Finland vs Sudbury (Part 1)

For the past two weeks, I had been writing about the Finnish educational system. I would now like to compare it with the democratic school system like Sudbury Valley School, of which I had also previously written.

(If you’re just getting on board my column now, you can read up on my past articles to learn more about these two systems -- just search for “Sudbury Valley School”, “Learning Democracy” and “Learning from Finland” on sunstar.com.ph).

As a short recap, the Finland model is not that far from the traditional schooling that we know, except that it has a lot of breaks in between subjects (15 minutes after every 45-minute lecture), minimal homework, and offers students more autonomy and collaborative opportunities for both teachers and students.

The Sudbury model or the democratic school model, however, is probably something 99% of you haven’t heard of. The shortest possible way to describe it a school where students are free to do whatever they want, provided that it is legal and within the school rules; and the school rules are decided by votation by both teachers (called staff ) and students.

I will not describe the Sudbury model in detail here as I have done that before, and it will take a lot of space. But I believe there is a question on the minds of those reading about it for the first time here: “How can kids learn anything if you just let them do what they want? They’ll just play video games all day!”

The short answer to that is that Sudbury has been turning out productive citizens for the past 50 years (it started in 1968), and according to their studies, around 80% of their graduates go on to the college of their choice. Many schools in other countries have also studied and adopted the Sudbury model. So yes, even if Sudbury had students who played, or fished, or chatted with their friends all day, that doesn’t mean they didn’t learn anything and they grew up to be businessmen, artists, and professionals in various fields just like most everybody else who went through a traditional education.

So given these two systems, which one do I think is better?

I am biased towards the Sudbury model. I happen to think that it is the most liberating concept in education. Sudbury founder, Daniel Greenberg, likes to compare traditional school with prison (and many kids, and even you, may feel the same way). And the reason it’s prison is because the student has very little freedom -- someone else tells him what to study, and for how long, and how he’s

supposed to behave, and what he’s supposed to wear, and so on. He is subject to the authority of the teachers and the principal, like prisoners have to listen to their guards or the warden, or risk getting punished.

Now, that is traditional schooling in a nutshell, and if you look at Finland, it still follows the basic framework of traditional

education. Everyone has to study their reading, writing and arithmetic, and history, science, geography, algebra, trigonometry, and all these other subjects that other people have deemed “essential” to basic education.

What Finland has done, however, is to make prison more palatable.

More next week.