From: ksand@apple.com (Kent Sandvik )
Newsgroups: soc.culture.nordic
Subject: Re: Pakkoruotsi Suomen kouluissa
Date: 13 Nov 92 01:53:58 GMT
Followup-To: soc.culture.nordic
Organization: Apple

In article <WALVER.92Nov12071717@kielo.uta.fi>, walver@kielo.uta.fi (Ville
V. Walveranta) wrote:
>         As I wrote in Finnish in my previous posting, many Finns -
>         including me - are forced to waste their resources to Swedish.
>         It's is true that Swedish might be useful for people who do
>         trade with Sweden, however, most Finns won't have a career in
>         foreign trade. For an average Finn it would be much more useful
>         to know, for instance, German or French or Spanish, which they
>         could utilize while traveling abroad. Swedish can be used only
>         in Scandinavia while any of those other languages can be used
>         all over the world.

Here we go again. To start with if we would think this way most Finns
would not need to learn *any* languages, because they are not salesmen,
neither do the often travel, with the exception to Sweden or Spain.

>         Motivation is also an important issue. If you don't want/aren't
>         at all interested in learning something, you won't. I'm sure
>         many people would still select Swedish even though it was one of
>         the options.

You know, there's a need for a solid curriculum, otherwise people that
don't want to learn basic maths would skip that one, same with 
basic language skills.

> > One reason I appreciate European high school education is the level
> > of language training. If someone wants to kill that, they don't
> > realize the consequences. Especially if they want to kill the teaching
> > of Swedish, and at the same time the economy in Finland is in shambles
> > and their most important trade partners are in the West, not in the
> > East. It's a good sign of narrow-minded thinking, IMHO.
> 
>         As I said, we're not discussing about killing the language
>         education in Finland, rather making it possible to *select* the
>         language you're learning (one or two foreign languages could
>         still be mandatory, but you could select yourself what those
>         languages would be).

And in most cases you are *able* to select how long you want to study
Swedish compared with English, German and other languages. Students
are *not* that locked to study one language only. It's a matter of
the issue that Finland *does* belong to the Nordic countries, and 
as part of the responsibilities it is required to try to conform
to the Nordic culture in forms of at least have a basic understanding
of the culture and the language used in this part of the world.

Actually, if Finns really wanted to be separated from the Nordic community,
not learning Swedish, and so on, it would have happened long time ago.
I do think that the majority of Finns appreciate the educational level
of languages teached, and they also value the Swedish speaking skills
they obtain in school.

I'm afraid that we are entering the N period of language teaching in 
Finland flaming, so I will not continue with this thread. There are more
interesting things to talk about, actually. Just a note, I learned
Finnish as an obligatory item in school, and I don't think this was
something evil, even if I use Finnish 20 minutes a month today.

Kent
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Kent Sandvik (UUCP: ....!apple!ksand; INTERNET: ksand@apple.com)
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