In the visit at the Municipal Museum of Helsinki I could understand how Helsinki has become what it is now, and the thing that surprised me the most was specially that once the Russian Empire was defeated and the Civil War was ended, Finland started to build a new society based in the education of all the people. It was very interesting to see how the classrooms were here years ago because if I compare them to the classrooms in Spain nowadays, there are no significant changes.
Although the museum shows how this city was evolutioning in many aspects, I would like to focus in the Educational System. I found in this progress an example to follow for other countries because until the 1960s, a date that is not so far away from the actuality, the level of education in Finland was pretty low, in fact, only one in ten adult had completed their basic education reaching an university degree. Nowadays, the ninety nine percent of finnish people complete compulsory basic education, a fact that can surprise anyone. When we talk about improving our current Educational System here in Spain it feels like a really far and utopian future, but we can see from here that it’s not impossible.
Another thing that was very surprising for me about the museum was how didactical it is for the children. You can touch and feel everything, the old rooms and bars, the old toys... As a future primary school teacher, i found this fact very useful because pupils can learn about history through a museum in a fun and enjoyable way.
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To sum up, I think that teachers should take in account that learning process has many ways of carrying out and they have a lot of different types of resources to do it. They should be in contact with museums and other teaching-learning places to achieve a productive impact on students, letting them acquiring new knowledge in a didactic way. Pupils should know that: learning is a fun and useful process, that they need to become cultural people in the future and take part in the society, and it is also very important for them to understand this because if they do not do it they will be demotivated in school and their curiosity will be getting lower while they are growing up. It is our goal, as teachers, to make students clear that learning is a life-long process and we all keep learning until the end of our lives; as Michelangelo said “I am still learning”.
