Finnish Children Go To School ... (by Liisa Salmi)

… at the age of seven. Internationally this is rather late, but practically every child in Finland goes first to preschool at the age of six. For the time being, preschool is mostly included in the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, like day care, but serious suggestions have been made to move it to Ministry of Education, like schools, and it seems obvious that a transition will take place.

Basic education takes nine years, and after that the children (the youngsters) go to a three-year gymnasium (senior high school) or to vocational school, which takes 2 to 4 years. If you are an energetic youngster, you can take both simultaneously, so when you take the matriculation exam (get your white cap) you may also have taken a vocationally oriented exam as well.

We have circa 25 universities in Finland, all government owned, where you can try to get in (we have numerus clausus) and five of the universities have a medical faculty. The hardest places to be admitted to are the universities that represent arts, such as the Theatre Academy, University of Art and Design and Sibelius Academy. Just now the Government has suggested, on the basis of a committee's work, that we found an “Innovation University” by putting together the Technical University in Espoo, the University of Art and Design in Helsinki and the School of Economics in Helsinki and giving them a lot of money .The committee's thoughts are considered too simplified in universities because a very innovative university cannot be created just by making the technical people find the innovations, the artistic people giving them a nice form and the economic people selling them worldwide.

There are 28 polytechnics in Finland all over the country and the Ministry of Education think now that they are too many in a rather small country, and they want to discontinue a part of them. It is true that not all of them get full admittance and there are “empty” places, and it seems that these schools, which are rather a new idea in Finland, still seek their place in society and have to better adjust in the educational system.

Anyway, there is a great change going on in the Finnish university world, and new models of administration are intensively sought. All these changes were started during the previous (socialist) government, but when the conservatives got the power, the speed of changes has remarkably increased.

Liisa Salmi