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Every morning, Arja Salonen drops her five-year-old son, Onni, off at a daycare centre in Espoo, west of Helsinki, where he will spend the next eight hours doing what Finnish educators believe all children his age should do: playing.
School, and formal learning, does not start in Finland until age seven. Before then, children’s preoccupations are not reading, writing or arithmetic, but, said Salonen, herself a secondary-school teacher in the capital, “learning more important things”.
Those include, she says, how to make friends, communicate, be active, get creative, explore the outdoors and manage risk. “In Finland we feel children must be children, and that means playing – including, as much as possible, outdoors,” she said.
The main goal of kindergarten, which about 75% of three- to five-year-olds attend, according to the Finnish educational expert Pasi Sahlberg, is “not to prepare children for school academically, but to make sure they are happy and responsible individuals”.
Not all education systems in Europe are like Finland’s, which places equality at its core, outlawing formal exams until age 18 and eschewing parental choice, selection, streaming by ability and league tables.
The pandemic has also focused minds on the importance of play in Germany, where – although playgrounds have remained open since the end of the first lockdown – many parents and paediatricians say children’s needs have been at the bottom of the government’s agenda throughout the crisis.