The Rise and Change of Comprehensive Planning: The Finnish Experience

Finland is a Nordic country with only 4.9 million people occupying a large land area, and with a small developed national economy. In many respects Finland stands midway between eastern and western Europe in the historical development of its social and economic structures (Alapuro, 1980; Allardt, 1982). Although it has been a periphery for the industrial centres of Europe, it acts as an interface between eastern and western centres. Finland was more agrarian and less industrialised than other western European countries even as late as the 1960s. Nevertheless it had already been drawn into the capitalist world economy at the end of the l9th century because of its forest resources and the increase in the demand for paper and pulp. Thus the fact that forests were largely owned by farmers has been of vital social and political importance. Between 1960 and 1975 Finnish society underwent one of the fastest structural transformations in Europe, to become an industrial, capitalist welfare state. Education had a crucial role to play in the transformation process. In fact the education system was one of the channels of migration from rural areas and from agriculture to the cities, and into both industry and the service sector (Antikainen, 1981, 1985). For individual migrants, education was an important personal resource, or as social and cultural capital. Since the late 1960s the ideal of a comprehensive education system has been the major rationale behind Finnish education policy. This article tries to describe how the ideology of comprehensive educational planning has been produced, altered and implemented and has failed to be implemented in Finland in recent decades.