The Suomalaiset – Finns to you – have a word we could well adopt in English: “sisu”, a term that means a mix of physical and mental stamina, the sort of inward resilience that allows you to hack your way across the winter tundra after a wolf has torn your leg off (in Finland, it’s also a brand of truck).
You need a bit of “sisu” to cope with the ideological pumpings of the right — a case in point, being Blaise Joseph and Jennifer Buckingham’s comment piece for The Age on Wednesday, decrying the recent enthusiasm for the Finnish school system as a model for Australia. The article is mostly mealy-mouthed question-begging: While acknowledging that Finland’s socialist, low-testing, non-streaming, flexible system delivers the best results in the world:
Yes, Finland consistently outperformed Australia on all the international standardised tests in 2016, and of course we should be willing to learn lessons from the top-performing countries – including the East Asian ‘tiger economies’.
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Before going on to whine:
But Finland’s international test results have declined in recent years.
Yes, they’re not No. 1 by such a large margin. But it’s always difficult to judge specialist commentary, even when you suspect it’s desperate neoliberal propaganda. If only one had a test to tell you whether it was horseshit.
Finnish is also a simpler language than English, which means learning to read is relatively easier.
That’s horseshit. It’s based on the fact that Finnish has phonetic spelling, and so writing take-up in primary years may be quicker at some stages. After that, it gets harder. Way harder. Finnish — as this writer can attest, having spent part of a year trying to learn it (for a girl; everyone who ever learnt Finnish was either a CIA Cold War station chief, or it was for a girl) — is bloody murder, even for native speakers.
The language is non-Indo-European. English is an “isolate” language — words don’t alter their spelling much according to noun case, or verb mood. Most Indo-European languages are “inflected”: i.e. in French the adjective must agree with the noun — les maisons bleues (not bleu), “the blue houses”. Finnish, from the Ural-Altaic group, is noun-case-heavy and agglomerative. Case-heavy? Each noun has up to 20 cases, with singular and plural for each — 40 forms for each. The word changes whether it’s a subject, object, possessive, ablative (motion towards), elative, illative, adessive etc, and many more. Here’s the word list for ajastaika (“year”).
Note, how the root changes through three different forms as the endings change. You have to know it all.
But wait, there’s more! After that, you have to add particles to the end to indicate questioning, subject-object relation, etc. Here are the case-differences for “kauppa” (a shop), together with particles: from kauppa (nominative singular), to kauppa-ko (nominative singular clitic-interrogative … don’t ask), to, around 250 forms later, kaupo-i-tta-nsa-kin-ko-han ABE PL SGPL3 KIN KO HAN (really, don’t ask).
The latter means something like, I think, “are they [going] to the shop with me too?” (I may have that totally wrong, and Google translate has problems with these long noun forms).
But wait there’s more! Finnish has multiple verb moods – stuff like the subjunctive in French, for actions that are potential, imaginary, possible, etc.
The upshot is that young Finns are learning the details of their language, and making case and particle errors, well into their teens. Like all languages that have survived from a pre-modern people, it has preserved “classificatory” systems, that are actually genuinely more complex and difficult for its native speakers than “isolate” languages like English or Malay.
But wait, there’s more! Finnish students have to learn Swedish as well, from grade four — an Indo-European language with no common vocabulary — and then add English. All Finns under about 65 are tri-lingual. Recently, a fourth language option has been added in high school, usually Spanish, German or Russian.
It’s a considerable achievement, and an easy clue to the right-wing fudging in the piece, the propaganda model they pursue, and gullibility of The Age in running such stuff for “balance”.
Mind you, Joseph and Buckingham are right: east-Asian systems such as South Korea, also get impressive results — using test-heavy, long hours, streamed, high-discipline schools. They also top the charts in something else: teenage and youth suicide and depression
Yes, what a great model — for the miserable neoliberal hell of an education system they are urging on us all. Those poor kids could lose some “sisu”.
Expect more from your journalism.
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“If only one had a test to tell you whether it was horseshit.” I think we do. Aren’t these people from the Centre for Independent Studies?
Nice one David. No relation to whom, Washington Irving?
Indeed Guy, what a load of crap and not a teacher among them. I have listened and spoken to Sahlberg and he makes plenty of sense, he also compares systems with NAPLAN things and without. Guess which ones aren’t improving? The East Asian systems are very culturally monolithic and of course discipline is very stern. Even the boss man of Singapore said he thought they were chasing the wrong road. We send our kids to school to young, we waste time in pre school teaching things many of them are not ready for and above all, the ones in greatest need do not get the most spent. Sahlberg point out that no matter the system, if there is high equity there are good results. The right keep blathering about outliers on the system. I can make a very good statistical case that since Howard upped the private school funding massively and everyone else followed him, our results have been on the decline. Are we wasting money on the haves and under resourcing the have nots? Gonski matters and it was starting to work in NSW. One standout in our set up is how big the wealth/education gap is. In systems that exceed our results this is an obvious difference.
Re: Finnish education
Thank you, Guy Rundle, for exposing the sheer stupidity expressed in the ‘comment piece’ about Finnish education in The Age last Wednesday.
As for that comment about the simplicity of the Finnish language, Guy rightly points out that it is fiendishly difficult to learn for almost anyone – that is other than Estonians.
Back in the 1960s I studied for a year in Finland and have made numerous trips back since. For this 50 or more years I have been wrestling with the language. I can now have a reasonable conversation with a cab driver but still struggle to read a newspaper. The second language of the country, Swedish, is much easier for English speakers, especially Scots. My Finnish friends like to joke that they have the ‘World’s most private language’ – maybe Basque would give them a run for their money!
I remember that we hapless English-speaking ex-pats used to say that it would take us a week to learn as much Finnish as we could Swedish in a day.
As for their education system. A few years ago I was staying with some Swedish-speaking friends when we were visited by their eight year old grandson who was attending a state-run primary school. I was amazed how he was speaking excellent Finnish to his mother, excellent Swedish to his grandparents and excellent English to me.
I suggest that the authors of that Age article consult Prof Fred Karlsson’s ‘Finnish – An Essential Grammar’ Routledge, London. That will blow their minds!
By their lights shall we know them. Dim bulbs indeed.
Thanks for the warning. I won’t trust the Mac language widget to give the correct Finnish translation.
Re the bit about the Finns not being number one by such a large margin: does that mean that if Federer wins Wimbledon by only a couple points he will be judged as slipping in standard?