“Even though its success has become legendary, the Finnish education system, which has entered a reform process in recent years, targets equal opportunity for all and free access for all. Regardless of anything else, access to education of similar quality for everyone is the core principle of the system. And this principle, with all its positive and negative consequences, prioritizes producing the output of ‘raising the educational baseline for everyone’ rather than the objective of ‘boosting elite students to great heights’.

Furthermore, the school system predominantly rests on the principles of school autonomy, trust in the teacher, and the school/teacher bearing responsibility. The state guides the system through legislation, information, and financing. The national curriculum determines the general direction of education but leaves wide scope for local adaptation to schools and teachers. This makes the teacher not just an actor implementing the lesson plan, but an expert designing classroom instruction.

Moreover, teaching is considered a very exclusive profession, with its social standing and income. In Finland, starting from basic education, teachers are expected to hold qualifications at a Master’s degree level. For instance, clear qualification requirements like a ‘Master’s degree in education’ are officially defined for class teaching.

In the logic of measurement and evaluation in Finland, there are no national exams. The teacher primarily performs student assessment. Thanks to this, classroom assessment is based on providing feedback that advances learning, rather than producing ‘rankings’. This measurement relies more on the everyday quality of instruction, not on a single exam day.

In short, Finland has set equal opportunity in education as a priority goal, left educational institutions autonomous in carrying out their work, made the school capable of tracking its own output, learning, and developing itself through flexible governance, configured teaching as a highly-qualified professional vocation, and connected assessment to classroom learning.

Even if results fluctuate in some years, the system is open to self-adjustment on a school, classroom, and student basis by intervening in areas such as learning support and attention environment at points where it perceives a problem.

Although a similar understanding might seem like a dream in Turkey today, it is possible. For this, it is necessary to support schools in becoming learning and self-improving institutions themselves and establish an internal logic that also makes the teaching profession exclusive.

Whereas right now, private schools, private tutoring, courses, etc., are omnipresent, and the teacher is striving while being crushed at the very bottom of this pyramid, in a low-income bracket. In this current situation, this makes the large leap that needs to occur even more difficult.

We desperately and urgently need such a transformation. Because the misuse of artificial intelligence and attention deficit based on media consumption habits are further eroding our already exam-focused and rote-heavy learning practice.

We need to re-teach children how to learn for the future. Of course, first our teachers also need to re-learn this for the post-GenAI world, and our schools need to become learning entities themselves. Much work lies ahead.”