Learning to manage the Language the strategy of Finland’s educational model
Recently the PISA report has put Finland as the Top-performer in education in Europe. No surprise that Finland, a leading country in ITC use in companies and by the families, is also top-performer in education. The surprise was that the cause of such a good performance in education was primarily the importance of teaching children to speak perfectly the Finnish language but also their original mother-language. Thus, immigrants got free courses of their mother-language too.
Humans are strongly tied to the language. One difference of our language with other animals is the combinatorial power it has. Since the classics, the Greeks, the romans, the study of the language and the study of human thinking has gone together.
As a lecturer I have been watching how students arrive from high school with less linguistic abilities. This could be a nonsense if we think that we have more access to information than ever before, and most of it is written.
The reason why is, I believe that there’s not much concern from parents and from politicians on building a society that values the richness of words, the color and variety of vocabulary, the preservation of traditional expressions, the accurate expressing of thoughts, the dignity of using communication as an instrument for progressing, the protection of language as our principal heritage, conceiving any language as a single icon of a culture and of an understanding of the world shedding a different chromatic influence to the global vision that we can acquire today with the network society.
Governments are still fighting for cultural differences, and languages mean often social and political exclusion. There’s a need to make the xisting language map sustainable. In Africa, in Asia, in South-America, even in North-America and in Europe, many languages are threatened by the ignorant policies of dominant communities to impose the use of most extended languages. The Unesco has also expressed its concerned on endangered languages. It’s page says: Languages are not only extremely adequate tools of communication, they also reflect a view of the world.
The Finnish model is a lesson to learn on how progress is tied to such a simple, but sophisticated and fragile element in humans life like the language.
Kiitos!
