#i think it depended sometimes if finland was in the final... i wasn't that interested if it wasn't

[erdariel]

Okay this is. going to be a rant because frankly I need to rant about this.

To begin with and answer OP's question; it's complicated. I'm from Finland, and here it's... mandatory, but the class you actually take depends on your religion (or, like, what that religion is on paper, I suppose). Majority of students take the Evangelical Lutheran Christian class, since that's the majority religion around here. Those who aren't members of that religion, though, should get education on their own religion, though (I didn't really hang out with the muslim kids in my class so I don't entirely remember how this was handled with islam, whether that was school classes or something arranged after school. For those kids that were part of smaller minority religions, I know their religious education was arranged somehow outside school, but again, I'm not sure of the specifics of how that worked). For me, as I was - and still am - not a member of any religion, that meant a class called "elämänkatsomustieto", which I'd take at the same time as other kids would have their religion class. I'm not entirely sure how to translate the term in English, tbh.

Anyway, my point I want to rant about is, the teaching of that subject was an absolute fucking shitshow.

I'm not entirely sure when schools started having to offer that as an alternative to religion classes. Wikipedia tells me that in 2018, about 7.7% of all the comprehensive school students in Finnish took it instead of a religion class.

What this in my experience translated to, in the schools I went to (schools in an urban area near the capital city, over the 2000s and 2010s) was maybe at most 10 students in the class, and usually less. In my primary school (grades 1-6), we were grouped together so that it was grades 1-3 studying the subject together as one class, and grades 4-6 studying it together in one class. Which pretty much meant we never actually got anywhere and were going through the same about three topics over and over again year after year. (The fact that several of the kids I took the class with were either generally disruptive or specifically bullied me did not help in getting anywhere with the class)

But even besides the disruptiveness, it was a poorly organized class that was almost never taught coherently, and often the focus of the class skewed heavily towards the teacher's personal interests. From grades 1-6 we didn't have books to study from at all. Grades 7-9 we did but they were old and honestly the way the teacher taught still wasn't very coherent. High school (I think it was one or two mandatory courses across three years) was finally coherent with new, up-to-date teaching materials the teacher actually used in a coherent fashion.

I think the topics that should have been covered in those classes were stuff like ethics, culture, overview of multiple world religions, stuff like that, but it was hard to actually really grasp any specifics because of the messy way it was taught. Sometimes I wonder if even the teachers knew what the class was supposed to consist of. And as I said, a teacher's personal interests and approach often heavily impacted what we actually were taught - which I frankly don't think should be the case in school classes?

Like, my grades 1-6 teacher in the class was involved with Unicef, so in her classes the focus was pretty heavily on human rights and that sort of thing. And that's when she could manage to get the more disruptive kids to behave enough to teach anything at all; half the time we ended up just watching something instead. On a good day, that something might have been a documentary or a philosophical short film or an anti-bullying PSA, something educational we were supposed to actually talk about afterwards. More often it was literally Garfield animations. Like this is the actual level that the teaching was at. I mean, I liked the teacher well enough, she was nice enough and I had the sort of personality at the time that easily made me a teacher's pet, but she could not control the class for shit and I wish I was kidding about spending a significant amount of class time watching Garfield animations.

Grades 7-9 teacher? Well, he tried. We had actual textbooks for the class and sometimes we even used them. But the disruptive kids were still a bit of an issue, and like. So, he was an art teacher, and that was definitely his primary focus and what he actually had an education for. So in his classes, the focus was a lot on culture from like, art and architecture perspective, as well as the evolution of humans (...try watching a documentary that includes the words "homo erectus" with a group that includes several 14-year-old boys). And again, we ended up spending a lot of time watching documentaries. Also at one point we watched Matrix for some reason, but for whatever reason (I don't remember anymore why) I was absent the week when we watched the first half of it so I only ever saw the second half, and didn't really retain a lot of anything of what I saw or what it had to do with anything.

High school teacher? Finally, actually had planned the classes in a way where we'd get something out of it (despite the fact that for a lot of us, our previous experiences of the class were fragmented and incoherent, so he kinda had to bring us up to speed on all the stuff we might have missed due to 9 years of poor teaching), and we went over probably more things than we'd actually gotten through in all my previous classes on the subject. It actually finally felt like I was getting something out of the class. The teacher also taught philosophy and English, so the classes had a definite philosophy-flavoring to them, but honestly philosophy goes fairly well together with the actual thing, so that was fine. However, while I liked the teacher (he bought me an ice cream once, but that's unrelated), and his classes were actually coherent and like... useful, he was the sort of person that it was really really easy to get him going on a tangent about something only half-related for like twenty minutes. Usually it was something interesting, but still.

Also that high school teacher was actually very easy to get started up on a rant about why the way elämänkatsomustieto as a subject was poorly designed and poorly taught, was comprised of topics that touched on far too many different other school subjects, and often just shoved to whichever teacher will agree to teach it (who may or may not actually be in any particular way qualified to teach it). So the fact that even he, the teacher, acknowledged that the non-religious alternative subject to religious classes is poorly arranged in Finland honestly makes me feel more justified in ranting about how disorganized and bad the way it was taught to me was.

Anyway, it's been a few years now. I don't know if things have changed; might be that elämänkatsomustieto is taught a lot better now. I sure hope it is, but I don't know. But like. My experience is that the whole thing could do with a major, fundamental, redesign in how it's taught (and who teaches it), and every time I think about my experience with it i get sooooo goddamn annoyed

...actually now that i think about it. did you have religion class in school? also was it mandatory??

extra points reblog and tell me where youre from in the tags because for us religion* is a non-mandatory class where in high school you don't get grades but extra points that might help you in other classes**

*and with that i mean Christianity Class because wow i love being in the same region where the pope is /s ** which is the only reason i kept attending