Comment: This story on HS.fi has me perplexed: We speak of the importance of growing up in an international environment but we do not want our children to attend schools where children of immigrant backgrounds are a noticeable minority never mind majority.
A poll published by Helsingin Sanomat, the country’s largest daily, showed that 57% of parents who have children (ages 7-16) would like to place limits on the number of children of immigrant backgrounds at school. Twenty-eight percent were against such caps.
Migrant Tales has reported on this issue in January and February. One of the questions that these polls earlier this year ask is if public servants like teachers can limit or choose whom they’ll teach? Can the police do the same? Is segregating schools by placing caps constitutional?
These type of polls show how new cultural diversity is in Finland. While some Finns may claim to want their children to grow up in an international environment it is quite another thing in practice.
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Enemmistö pääkaupunkiseudun peruskouluikäisten lasten vanhemmista haluaisi koulujen rajoittavan maahanmuuttajataustaisten oppilaiden osuutta luokissa. Vanhempien kanta ilmenee Helsingin Sanomien TNS Gallupilla teettämästä mielipidemittauksesta.
There is a reason why schoolteachers require special training and why the discipline of pedagogics exists as an element of this training.
If a majority of people in Helsinki supported the use of bloodletting as a universal panacea at the City General Hospital, would this alone be grounds for changing patient care policies?
Effective school education is no more a matter of intuition than effective medicine.
If the findings of Gallup polls are to be believed, then private schools admitting children of any cultural and ethnic background based purely on the ability of their parents to pay high fees should substantially disadvantage their students by comparison with ordinary schools that have a more culturally and ethnically homogeneous intake of children from a less privileged catchment area.
Read this story a few minutes ago, and really, I was totally shocked. Had to re-read the story to make sure what I read was indeed true;more than 50% of Finnish parents do not want too many immigrants in the same classes with their children!
These Finns never cease to amaze me! What those people are saying indirectly is that immigrant children, by virtue of their immigrant background, can never perform as well academically as a white Finn.
This view I must say, is held by quite a few Finns. They actually believe that skin colour denotes one’s intellect and level of intelligence. I did my tertiary level schooling here in Finland, and each and every day, I had to fight to prove otherwise.
The other disturbing thing here is that by “immigrants”, those Finns also include Finnish children with an immigrant background. What hope do these children have, when from very young, they feel the discrimination in Finland?? It is not right for parents to teach their children to hate, fear and discriminate against other children. By sowing these seeds of intolerance and hatred in their children, the Finns are actually breeding future racists and skinheads!
Racism will continue to rise in Finland, when parents teach their children to hate!
“Is segregating schools by placing caps constitutional?”
To be honest, letting the situation develop the way it has now done, some schools having a lot of students of immigrant background and some having practically none, is what leads to segregation.
I don’t think that the answer is sending some of the kids to a school on the other side of the city. But I do think it is a serious issue. In the long term you can influence this with housing policies, in the short term it’s hard to do anything I guess.
“What those people are saying indirectly is that immigrant children, by virtue of their immigrant background, can never perform as well academically as a white Finn.”
No. Some of them might think so but only some. What most of them are thinking is that when a child has to go to school in a language that is not her native, she will need a bit of extra attention, at least in the beginning. When there are a lot of children needing this type of extra attention, there might not be enough resources for it and the quality of the teaching might suffer.
This is a fact and this is why the city of Helsinki gives extra funding to the schools that have a lot of children with immigrant background. So far nobody has considered this policy racist or even less called for its cancellation.