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Finland dares an experiment: school subjects are abolished! Good idea?
Learning without a fixed school subject? 45 minutes of math, then history, then German? How does that work? Finland now wants to abolish rigid school subjects.
"You learn for life, not for school." How many times have we heard this sentence back then? But let's face it, how much of the stuff we've learned in school is still being used today? That should change: The curriculum should be closer to life!
The school system is criticized in many countries. With us the criticism of student and Twitter user Naina caused a sensation. In it, she criticizes how far from life the current school system is.
There is also a discussion in Finland about how lifelike the lessons actually are and the republic is now becoming active. Finland wants to radically redesign its school system by 2020.
A big step: The rigid school subjects should be abolished.
No more 45 minutes of math. At some secondary schools in Finland, the new system has already been successfully implemented: instead of school subjects, Finnish students are being taught "phenomena".
For example, instead of learning a foreign language and math, students learn the phenomenon of gastronomy. And within this thematic area, students learn to create invoices (ie maths), take orders in a foreign language, and communicate training. This should prepare better for working life.
Sounds pretty practical and actually Finnish schools are already experiencing initial successes: For two years, schools in Finland are obliged to carry out this new teaching method once a year for a few weeks. And evaluations show that students actually perform better in the classroom.
But the new teaching without school subjects also encounters difficulties that would certainly exist here in Germany: The teachers are not trained for it! During years of teaching studies, one learns to apply rigid school subjects and the corresponding teaching methods and didactic resources also related to subjects. The retraining of teachers to this new teaching method is associated with much effort and cost. In Finland, teachers who embrace the new system will be lured with a wage increase - even more.
Marjo Kyllönen, responsible for education in Helsinki, will present her proposal to implement the reforms across the country by 2020 by the end of the month. There is already great interest in the new model abroad.
