The state of democracy education in Finnish primary school-education

Abstract

In this thesis, I have studied the state of democracy education in Finnish primary school education. I gathered the data for the thesis in the summer and autumn of 2015. In the summer, I interviewed five people who have been working to develop education in Finland to be more democratic. In the autumn, I spent a month in a primary school gathering data ethnographically by observing, taking pictures and videos, and conducting interviews with pupils and teachers to gain an understanding of everyday life in the school. After gathering sufficient data to capture the everyday life and workings of the school, I compared the observed ways of doing and acting with democratic ideals in order to analyse how democracy education was understood and actualised in the studied school. Based on the fact that every teacher in Finland qualifies, ideally, via the same kind of teacher education programme, and by analysing the Finnish national core curricula from the years 1985, 1994, 2004 and 2014, I was able to construct arguments that are in one way or another perceivable throughout Finland. Based on my study, I argue that democracy education in Finland is still strongly tied to traditional, representational understanding of democracy. Representational democracy is based on the idea that there are normatively ‘right’ competencies that people, who can influence public policy, should have. This understanding is, however, in contradiction with the pronouncements of, for example, the national Report on Democracy Education (Demokratiakasvatusselvitys, FNBE [Finnish National Board of Education], 2011), the current National Core Curriculum for Basic Education (FNBE, 2014), which state that every individual should be educated to have active, democratic agency. Therefore, in this thesis I offer a way to understand democracy education in existential terms, i.e., how education could be organised and carried out in a manner that everyone would become a democratic agent in reality. By democratic agency I mean that people understand themselves and otherness, are able to engage in dialogue and to comprehend contemporary power and politics, as well as being capable of participating directly in the planning and realisation of different actions in their local, national or global communities.