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“Our motto is learning by doing,” says Marie-Louise Adolfsson, Director of the Annantalo Arts Centre for Helsinki’s children and young people. The young gentleman in the photo is one of her “clients”, who was featuring in the role of a school headmaster in a film made by a children’s group at Annantalo during the interview.

Arts, school and education

Anna-Maija Gruber

 

In western countries, the school is normally understood to be the place where the basics of general education are taught. What this education should include, however, is a far more complicated question. In Finland, the presentday school is exposed to many new and often contradictory demands. Rapidly developing technology has changed the attitudes of both parents and pupils, and the “useful” science subjects are appreciated and preferred, while the arts seem to be on the losing side.

Generally speaking, there seems to be no major disagreement about the importance of the arts as an essential part of a person’s education. But somehow in the utilitarian viewpoint of learning, things that give more concrete benefits seem to direct the parents’ choices when they make decisions about the education of their own children. This preference is easily justified for mathematics and other scientific subjects, as well as for languages (globalization counts...). The official policy is strongly tending this way, too.

And when the discussion reaches the practical point of how to allot the total number of weekly hours to each subject, the interests of the various parties easily clash. Arts education is, officially and privately, considered important, but for various reasons its weekly hours have continuously diminished during the last century.

The teacher’s dilemma

“In many cases the weekly school hours allotted to arts education are too few to guarantee a proper level of education, but we do not want to start demanding them from the other subjects and thus raise an unnecessary controversy. And the total number of weekly school hours has already reached the peak, so there is no question of increasing them,” says Professor Arja Puurula from the Department of Teacher Education of the University of Helsinki, who is intensively looking for new ways of solving this and other educational dilemmas.

The 1993 law concerning basic arts education in communities and municipalities outside the comprehensive and secondary schools is leading to a situation where it is difficult to find full-time jobs for the qualified teachers of these subjects in a sparsely populated country like Finland. The Helsinki metropolitan area and the larger cities are better off, but the rural schools are often too small and too thinly scattered to provide enough lessons for a qualified music teacher, for instance. As a result, the required instruction must be given by somebody else – more and more frequently by someone without the proper training. “But bad instruction is worse than no instruction at all,” says Puurula.

At present, the Department of Teacher Education covers the whole range of arts and skills including subjects like drama, film, dance, music and the arts.

Rich private undergrowth

This equivocal situation of good intentions but little implementation has led to the growth of private music and arts schools all over the country.”Finns are real music-lovers, and Finland has an amazing variety of yearly festivals and cultural events. So it is not arts appreciation that is low. The problems are elsewhere. Therefore it is even more important that the benefits of basic arts education are available to everyone,” says Puurula.

She has developed new ideas about complementing the arts education given by the comprehensive and upper secondary schools with voluntary arts clubs as well with instruction supplied in cooperation with the private arts schools. She also suggests as solutions new projects such as combined art exhibitions and theatre performances.

Puurula recently initiated public discussion about the possibility of training teachers with a new system that would combine the qualifications for two or more arts subjects. This would require more co-operation between the universities and colleges, but she believes there is already a willingness to find new methods.

Complementary training could also be given to teachers who are now qualified for only one subject. Puurula also calls for more creativity in teaching and fears that a division into first and second class schools is on its way if nothing is done.

Remote teaching

The media-oriented modern world offers many new ways and methods for training and teaching. “The Internet is a very good means of providing new high-quality instruction material if it is critically selected. But it is not a proper solution for our teaching dilemma since arts education should always be in a person-to-person relationship with social and emotional issues. So it cannot be replaced by remote teaching, which can only be used to complement it,” says Puurula.

“Comprehensive basic education giving sufficient knowledge of aesthetic values and basic skills for managing in the working life should be the right of every child,” says Puurula. It is the best way of providing him or her with the abilities needed to understand this strange world of ours, with its new means of communication – and thus to survive in it.

Case Annantalo: the Helsinki house of the arts for children

“The purpose of Annantalo, the Arts Centre for Children and Young People, is to offer the children and teens of Helsinki an inspiring environment where they can make, see and experience the arts and culture,” says Marie-Louise Adolfsson, Director of the Arts Centre since 1993. The Arts Centre, financed and managed by the City of Helsinki, is located in the heart of Helsinki and is easily reached by the flocks of children and young people aged 0 to 18 years that are constantly flowing into the Centre from the nurseries, comprehensive and secondary schools of Helsinki.

“Our role is to supplement the school curriculum by offering lessons in a variety of arts subjects. The motto is learning by doing,” says Adolfs- son. The activities now include semester-long art workshops, intensive courses, exhibitions, as well as cultural and special events and projects. But among the most popular are the 5 x 2 courses, a system where the children from schools and preschools visit the Centre for five two-hour workshops. The courses are taught in groups of 10, each focussing on a particular subject, such as the arts, theatre, dance, and music.

The Arts Centre employs as many as 55 artists for the courses. About 6,000 children attend the courses every year – after waiting for a year for their turn. The total number of schoolchildren in Helsinki is about 65,000.

Every child’s right

“Basically, I think that arts education should be given in the comprehensive schools,” says Adolfs- son, who also disapproves of some secondary schools that are concentrating on arts education and are therefore turning into elite schools. “But the City of Helsinki has been quite generous towards us, even during the depression when we were given the possibility of hiring many competent but unemployed people. Thanks to this generosity, we are still able to offer our services free of charge to the schools of Helsinki – and we want to keep it that way,” says Adolfsson.