Across Finland, children’s learning outcomes have been slowly eroding in recent years, prompting the government to introduce new legislation to ban the use of personal devices such as phones during school hours to curb children’s screen time.
This fall, students in the Finnish town of Riihimaki started school with backpacks full of books, despite a decade of state-sponsored promotion of the use of laptops and other digital devices in classrooms. The Finnish public education system has gained a worldwide reputation for its good results in recent decades and its willingness to try new teaching techniques. Until recently, many schools gave free laptops to all students from the age of 11. However, Finnish parents and teachers – as elsewhere – are increasingly concerned about the impact of screens on children.
So Riihimaki, a town of about 30,000 inhabitants located 70 km north of Helsinki, where books have not been used in high schools since 2018, is trying something different at the start of this school year: going back to pen and paper. “Young people these days use phones and digital devices so much that we didn’t want the school to be a place where children just stare at screens,” said Maija Kaunonen, English teacher at Pohjolanrinne High School. distraction makes many children restless and too moody to concentrate. “Most students completed assignments as quickly as they could so they could move on to games and chatting on social media,” Kaunonen said during a class break. “And it didn’t take them long to switch tabs in the browser either. So when the teacher came to them, they could say, ‘Yes, I did this exercise.'”
One of Kaunonen’s students, 14-year-old Elle Sokka, said that she could not always concentrate on school subjects while learning digitally. “Sometimes I wandered off to different websites,” he said. Eighth-graders Miko Mantila and Inka Warro – both 14 years old – said their concentration has improved since returning to books. “For example, reading is much easier and I can read books much faster” – Mantila said, though he added that writing was easier on a digital device. “And if you’re doing homework late at night, it’s easier to fall asleep if you’re not looking at an electronic device,” Warro said.
Clinical neuropsychologist Minna Peltopuro, who is working with the city on the change, said total screen time should be kept to a minimum – Finnish teenagers currently stare at screens for an average of six hours a day – as excessive digital use carries physical and mental risks, such as with eye problems and increasing anxiety. “The other is multitasking,” Peltopuro said. “The brain is very sensitive to multitasking, and especially at a young age, you can’t handle it well.”
Source: sg.hu
