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| Photo from yle.fi |
Blogger's Notes:
Commentary of an Academic
(Copyright @ 2019 by Chester B Cabalza. All Rights Reserved).
As
Helsinki embarks on a new chapter to firmly stand as the capital of World Design,
owning a long history and strong heritage in design, Finland is a Scandinavian
nation that is praised all over the world for its intellectual reforms that has completely revolutionized the educational system of a
generation.
Finland
is rated among the planet Earth’s best education by investing on best practices
on holistic teaching environment and learning systems as it strives for equality
over excellence. It is admirable how a progressive and Nokia maker welfare
nation, almost the size of the Philippines, has no private universities, making
waves about its gold standard on public schools, subsidized through a fat
budget for Finnish inventive and innovative education that created the internet
browser, SMS (texting), sauna, angry birds, and Linux to name a few.
Despite
a tiny demography surrounded by thousands of lakes with a productive over five
million Finns and home to Santa Claus in wintery Lapland, Finland keeps an eye on
stress-free education system that discourages standardized tests, although
Finnish students culled with option, are given only one standardized test
called the National Matriculation Examination to be manually checked by competent
teachers, getting rid of exams automatically checked by computers, during their
primary and secondary schooling, to evenly encourage cooperation over
competition for the gifted and average students that seem to appear a win-win inclusive solution, unlike the rote memorization and stressful myopic
vision of Confucian education practiced by our East Asian neighbors.
Finland’s
novel and successful high literacy rate can be attributed to its individualized
basis grading system set by competent teachers. Finns value on free time and
more time for play that would excite Filipino pupils and students as their
recess time. This European Union member country merits teachers treated like
professors highlighting teaching as a noble profession. With a minimum of
master’s degree for all teachers, it is not so surprising that this Nordic
welfare state admits the select few teachers since collegiate programs is free
for all, so as master and doctoral programs. Responsibility over accountability
is conscientiously played over by Finn teachers, being highly revered for their
utmost contribution in nation-building, endowed with a vocation of molding the
minds of their country’s future generation.
The
Philippines’ affinity with Finland robustly cemented when the Finnish beauty queen
Armi Kuusela, the first ever Miss Universe, gave up her crown and married a
Filipino Columbia University alumnus and businessman Virgilio Hilario. The beautiful
couple wed in Tokyo and later on resided in Manila as they were blessed with five
children and six grandkids. However, Filipino-Finnish diplomatic relations
between the two arctic and tropical countries were established in July 1955
intensifying economic and trade partnerships. Today, Finland houses a small
Filipino community with continuous rounds of bilateral consultations.
In
light with the new mixed Filipina Miss Universe Catriona Gray’s advocacy of
providing free education to children from impoverished families, highlighting
one of her clever answers in the recent international pageant, the state of
Philippine education, whether in private or public, concerns all of us.
Philippine universities rank low in global university rankings undermining
several criteria on student-to-faculty ratio, citations per faculty on research
and development, and poor learning infrastructures, summing up a lacking
quality education. Although most Filipinos enrol in mandatory free education in
public schools for primary and secondary schooling, Philippine ‘public schools’
seems lethargic to quantity over quality education, where privileged families
and OFW parents send their children to private or exclusive schools to ensure
proper education for their children.
The
tuition-free education in all state universities in the Philippines has
received severe shortcomings in spite an aim to foster social development.
Gifted students in premiere specialized science and arts high schools, cadets
in military or naval and police academies, some of them defer paying back good
services to the country after the Philippine government had subsidized their
tuition fees and stipends as scholars, in lieu for brain drain or out of frustration
to serve the nation that once inspired them to excel.
Filipinos
should love and value teachers by placing them to their rightful place in Philippine
society. Their enabling force to nurture and teach students should be
supplemented with competence-building programs to enhance their gift for
teaching. Filipinos should inculcate among our kids that teaching is a noble
profession and the future of our state depends on them. Reforms in Philippine
educational system must also be pursued by selecting the best and the brightest
teachers to teach in public schools lessening inequality between the tugging
wars of private versus public schools.
The
Finnish education model teaches us a simple lesson. We need full cooperation
rather than competition to progress intellectually and socially as it promotes
equity and equality. The hierarchy of rankings dismisses the vision of
excellence as one university is higher over the other when the good intent is for
all citizens to become fully literate and numeric. Lastly, it is prestigious to
be schooled in public schools. After all, if we look at current global
university rankings, Oxford and Cambridge universities in the United Kingdom
remain the world’s top universities even if both are proudly public universities.
