Can the Finnish Education System Offer a Useful Direction for Iran? (A Comparative Reflection on School Avoidance, Emotional Attachment, and the Development of a Safe Educational Environment)

Finland is one of the countries whose education system has attracted considerable attention from educational researchers and policymakers around the world. Particularly following the strong performance of Finnish students in the early cycles of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), beginning in 2000, Finnish education came to be regarded in many academic and public discussions as a successful and distinctive example, and was sometimes described as an “educational miracle.” At the same time, academic research on Finland has emphasized the importance of historical, social, and cultural factors and has warned against overly simple interpretations of international assessment results. The central question of this paper is whether, despite the fundamental cultural and social differences between Finland and Iran, the Finnish educational experience can provide useful insights for reflecting on educational challenges in Iran. Rather than advocating the direct imitation of the Finnish system, this paper focuses on whether some of its underlying principles and experiences can be considered and adapted within the cultural and social context of Iran. Two closely related issues are emphasized. The first is school avoidance, understood in this paper not merely as physical absence from school, but also as students’ psychological, emotional, and motivational disengagement from the learning environment. The second is the strengthening of emotional bonds between students, teachers, and the school. The argument is that addressing these two issues appropriately may contribute to the development of a safe educational environment—one in which students gradually internalize the value of discipline rather than merely accepting it through coercion; learn to understand and identify problems and then work toward solving them; become capable of accepting differences in perspectives; and develop a responsible understanding of their relationship with society. On this basis, four major educational objectives are proposed, with one of them—problem-solving—consisting of two distinct stages: creating a sense of security; developing the ability to understand and identify problems and subsequently solve them; learning to interact with people who are different; and understanding the reciprocal relationship between the individual and society. The paper argues that these objectives can provide a framework for examining how selected elements of the Finnish educational experience might be adapted to the Iranian context.