The London newspaper The Independent recently published a sensational story about Finnish plans to abandon subject teaching in public schools. No more math, history and geography as separate lessons, it reported. Instead, students will study topics such as the European Union, picking up language and math skills and knowledge about geography and history as they go along. Even though that's not exactly what's happening in Finland, the article took off on social networks. Apparently, adjustments to rigidly compartmentalized learning sound good to a lot of people.
The Finnish curriculum reform scheduled for next year does nothing so exciting as abolishing subjects. It does call on schools to introduce periods in which so called "phenomenon-based" interdisciplinary teaching will be done. In Helsinki, the capital, two such periods will be required during the year, each to last for several weeks. At many other schools, especially in the hinterland, the periods will probably amount to less because teachers don't believe in the newfangled methods or don't understand how to use them.
Revolution is not the Finnish way; tinkering is. And that's just what the Finns are doing with curriculum.
As John Dewey once noted, when we have to re-examine what we learned in school, we often wonder how much unlearning and re-learning we've since had to do. I remember my 10 years of Soviet school as a crushingly boring waste of time. Everything I know, I learned elsewhere.
That doesn't mean the new Finnish approach would have worked for me. I'm not sure it matters whether you pick up subject matter from specialized textbooks or within a broader context; there's no universal best way to internalize information. I would have preferred to develop skills--basic ones like drawing and typing and more complex ones like research and presentation--than to be given a standardized amount of subject matter.
An economics teacher I know recently complained about the doctoral students in her advanced class: They had no common cultural background, she said, so it was hard to come up with examples they could all understand. They hadn't read the same books or watched the same movies, though they'd all grown up in the same country. Their concepts of their country's history varied widely. Yet they were all highly competent in their chosen areas of economics.
Isn't that great, though? People are more exciting, and their thinking is fresher, when they use similar skill sets to build widely divergent stocks of knowledge. That's not something the new Finnish system is going to promote.
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Leonid Bershidsky is a columnist for Bloomberg News.
Editorial on 03/29/2015