Paavo Viilup became a teacher because he hated his own school days. Teachers who constantly wanted to be right, never group assignments, the next test as the only dot on the horizon. Estonia had been a sovereign state for years at the time, but education was still Soviet-style. Now 26 years later, the bearded English and ICT teacher is counting his blessings. Compliments for Estonian education are piling up in international reports. According to the results of the renowned Pisa tests, which are administered in 79 countries, the country has the smartest 15-year-old teenagers in Europe. No country on the European continent scores better in all categories (reading, mathematics and science).
How could the small, former Soviet state transform into one of the most modern educational countries in Europe in three decades?
At the high school where Viilup works, the Viimsi Gümnaasium near the capital Tallinn, the final year students have no idea. ‘But my parents are surprised at what I already know and can do’, says a girl in the front row of the class. She dreams about continuing her studies in Paris.
The development of Estonian education is a story of ‘vision’ and ‘guts’, Villup says in a high school conference room.
And at Raatuse Kool primary school in Tartu, Estonia’s second largest city, they put it this way: the foundation of good education is love for education. Estonia spends 6.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) on education, the EU average is 5 percent. “We don’t have an Audi or Philips here, so we have to invest in our brains,” says board member Rene Leiner. Physics teacher Lauri Kõlamets: ‘The majority of our population is atheist. Education is our religion.’
The Disintegration of the Soviet Union
It has traditionally made teaching a highly regarded profession in Estonia, individuals to whom independence and freedom can be entrusted. Against this background, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 felt like a liberation for Estonian education. No more strict lesson plans and teaching methods, schools no longer served Moscow’s geopolitical goals (educating techies). Teachers, school leaders and politicians could teach the way they wanted and had a blank piece of paper on which to draw all their saved ideas.
Through history, music and drama lessons, the Estonian culture, which had been suppressed for fifty years, was brought back to life in the new curriculum. The Estonians also disregarded the renowned school system of their big brother Finland, such as free access to university and the organization of primary education. Children learn to read and write at the crèche, primary school in Estonia lasts from the age of 7 to 16. After that, they choose between an academic career (high school and college) or a ‘vocational school’. Such a longer primary school should combat social inequality, as has often been advocated in the Netherlands. The results of the Pisa tests show that it works. In percentage terms, no EU country has so few ‘underachieving’ students as Estonia.
The curriculum should teach ’21st century skills’: foreign languages, entrepreneurship, tech. By 2002, after major investments in Internet infrastructure, all schools in the country had a working computer. That laid the foundation for the digital society that ‘e-Estonia’ (as the country likes to sell itself) is today. The capital Tallinn is teeming with ICT start-ups. Few countries in Europe made the transition to working from home and distance learning as smoothly as Estonia during the pandemic, is the impression in the country itself.
School and teacher have ‘autonomy’
At Raatuse Kool primary school, the children skip through the corridors and during the break they play on one of the three sports fields. It is a stark contrast to the end of last year. After a small corona outbreak, the board decided to close the entire school at the time. ‘That hurt us less than, for example, shop owners who had to close their business’, says board member Leiner. But the decision was drastic, although the quality of education was hardly at risk, because everyone was well used to learning via the computer.
Raatuse Kool made the decision on his own, because there was no protocol for school closures in Estonia during the corona crisis. This has to do with an important change of course from the 1990s: the ‘autonomy’ for school and teacher was then established. The government employs only nine inspectors to monitor educational institutions. If a school falls below the national average, the board is not given strict instructions, but in many cases receives financial aid that can be spent without strict supervision. “The authorities are partners, not controllers,” says Leiner.
‘Schools have the right to solve their own problems first’, says Gunda Tire, who coordinates the Pisa tests for the government. Her daughter attends an educational institution that had poor results in math a few years ago. The school then put all poorly scoring children in a separate group, so that they received more attention and the rest did not stop. A year later, the backlog was cleared. ‘A teacher has to adapt his lesson based on the children he teaches. He can only do that if he has autonomy,” Tire believes.
Plural offer
Because the Estonian education system is based on trust, the range of schools on offer is very diverse. At progressive schools such as Raatuse Kool and the Viimsi Gümnaasium, terms such as tests and grades are almost insulting (Leiner: ‘The children forget what they learn in the days after’). On the other hand, the country also has a large, more conservative movement, with educational institutions that do believe in testing and classical teaching methods. The final year students at Viimsi Gümnaasium are excited to meet students from the more conversational schools next year at university. “You can learn from each other,” says another girl in the front row.
Freedom is an important reason for the ‘surplus of teachers’ Estonians have, as the European Commission concluded in a recent report. At Raatuse Kool primary school, more than sixty people – 48 teachers and additional staff – are responsible for the education of 550 students. Classes of less than twenty pupils are the rule rather than the exception, pupils with special needs receive even smaller-scale education. The small classes allow more individual attention to be given to students.
Six students in the class
‘Take your time, take your time’, English teacher Mailiis Meitsar reassures one of her students. Her class with 15-year-old students (equivalent HAVO level) consists of six students this Tuesday, normally there are ten. By the end of the lesson, nearly all students have given a presentation on fire safety—perhaps the best way to practice speaking skills. One student finds it difficult and emotionally storms out of the room with the teacher’s permission. Meitsar is not worried. “I know she prepared her presentation well.”
A lot of individual attention for students helps to keep the number of underachieving students low, they see in primary school. School psychologist Urve Talvik tells about various students who started out with her as a problem child in recent years, but gradually felt more and more at home in the school system. By simply investing a lot of time in them and communicating well with parents, Talvik says. ‘You should never underestimate children. You have to believe in them, believe and believe in them.’
Turnaround coming
But it is precisely this ‘learner surplus’, the foundation of Estonian educational success, that is under pressure. Half of all Estonian teachers are over 50, almost a fifth over 60. Their successors are anything but lined up. In rural areas it is sometimes impossible to find new teachers and men in particular have little interest in becoming teachers. The shortages are especially threatening in specific areas, such as mathematics, physics and chemistry. 27-year-old science teacher Lauri Kõlamets also does not see himself working at Raatuse Kool primary school all his life. Prefer to continue studying for a PhD and publish in renowned English-language journals.
Estonian development in recent decades creates a difficult issue. Thirty years after independence in 1991, none of the former Soviet states has a higher GDP per inhabitant than Estonia and Tallinn is one of the most attractive cities in Europe to start a business. Partly because education trains students to do so, the country has the ’21st century’ economy it wanted 30 years ago. But, Viilup sighs: ‘Who wants to be a teacher, if you can also work at a start-up? That’s a serious question. What else does a school have to offer?’
The Estonian government has been increasing the salary for teachers for a few years now. This year the average will rise to 1,586 euros gross, slightly above the average income for all professions in the country. ‘We invest more than 6 percent of GDP in education, which puts us in the top three in Europe. But at the same time, our teacher salaries are among the lowest in the European Union,” said Education Minister Liina Kersna last year. ‘That clearly shows that we have spent too little money on our highly regarded teachers.’
New generation of teachers
Yet, according to education professor Äli Leijen (University of Tartu), it is about more than money. She believes that the career prospects of teachers should be worked on. ‘Even in Finland, for example, young people don’t want to be teachers all their lives. The system may no longer be sustainable. In university you have professors, associate professors, teachers, researchers. Perhaps it is time to introduce such a system, with career opportunities, in primary and secondary schools as well.’
Paavo Viilup became a teacher because he granted new generations of Estonians a better education than himself. Now that better education is there, but the teaching profession only enthuses a small part of the youth. Education is in danger of becoming a victim of its own progress. Only a new dose of ‘vision’ and ‘guts’ can change that, says Villup. ‘If everything in society changes, education cannot stay the same.’