Germany Came to Helsinki for Answers. The Pupils Had Them.

In December 2001 the first PISA results came out. Finland came top. Germany came somewhere it did not wish to discuss. By the spring of 2002, Germans who cared about schools were heading north with notebooks, to work out what the Finns were doing.

The Deutsche Schule Helsinki was an obvious stop. It teaches in German, in Finland, to children of both countries, which makes it a natural laboratory for this kind of question. Reporters from the German press came too.

What they wrote down, in the end, was mostly what the pupils told them.

One pupil had studied in Germany and come back. Her version was simple. In Germany, she said, the teacher had a programme to get through. In Finland, teachers were more likely to ask what interested the class. And she had found, to her surprise, that she learned more when she was interested.

The visitors had come for a system, and they got a sixth-former who had tried both.

Another pupil added that they covered less material here, and that the point was to make sure everybody in the room had understood before the class moved on.

I have heard this argument before, at my own kitchen table, from the middle one, who has used it to explain why she is still on the first chapter of her history reading. She covers less, she says. She makes sure she understands. The understanding has taken eleven days and so far concerns the picture on the cover.

But I am stuck with the Helsinki pupils’ point, because it is the opposite of everything I do. My entire approach to homework is to get through the programme. I time it. I have a spreadsheet. My husband once found me colour-coding a Year 7 science worksheet by urgency, and quietly closed the door.

Germany, I gather, took its notes home and spent the next years arguing about them. I have done the same with the middle one’s argument. It is still on my desk, in a notebook, underlined in three colours.

Last night I tried the Finnish method. I asked her what interested her about history. She said, “The Vikings.” I said fine, we would do the Vikings.

She has been on the Vikings for a week. She has learned more than in the whole of last term. She has also learned that her mother can be beaten in an argument by reading about Finland, and I do not think that is the lesson the German delegation had in mind.