Finland Doesn't Use "Bilingual Education"

By: Bert Salonen, Consul of Finland at San Diego
Letters to the Editor, San Diego Union-Tribune
November 30, 1997.

Re: "Children can easily learn several languages" (Letters, Nov. 18):

In her letter, Margaret Jones offered Finland as an example of success in bilingual education.

The premise for language education in my country, however, is quite different than in California. A nation of only 5.1 million cannot expect people outside their borders to communicate in Finnish. Therefore, it is imperative for the Finns to be not only bilingual (the second official language being Swedish), but multilingual. The obvious most common choice of a "foreign" language is English. This explains, for instance, why Finland has the highest, per-capita Internet connections in the world.

I want to point out, however, that in Finnish public schools, bilingual or multilingual instruction is not used for art, geography, history, math, etc. Languages are separate subjects. Uniformity in education seems then to have kept standards high there.

BERT SALONEN
Consul of Finland San Diego