Kilpisjärvi school in Enontekiö, Finnish Lapland - nature of an arctic bilingual small school
By Timo Tuominen, head teacher
Kilpisjärvi is one of the most isolated villages in Finland: the nearest village in the municipality of Enontekiö, in Finland is Karesuvanto, 110 km´s away and on Norwegian side is Skibotn, 55 km away. Permanently in Kilpisjärvi lives about 110 inhabitants, but in recent years a lot of new free-time houses has been built in the village, mostly by Norwegians from the closest town, Tromsø. Also some Finnish Lapland- lovers have their cottages in the area, which is very special in the whole Finland and Europe by its nature and peoples, too. It has been one of the last escape areas of the Sámi people, and is dramatically balancing between reindeer-keeping and traditional lifestyle and growing cottage-building and motorized tourism. The area of three countries crossing (Finland, Norway and Sweden) and people moving across has formed some other lingual and ethnic minorities in the states of northern polar area.
Kilpisjärvi School was founded in demand of the parents in 1982 with one teacher and three pupils in primary school and started to practise in a room of a tourist lodge. At the same year it was possible to build permanent private homes in the village. Before that state officials and tourist workers with children moved away from Kilpisjärvi when their children turned seven! There was a possibility of boarding-school in Karesuvanto, but not too many used it since 1950´s. Now the population of the village started to grow, school got more pupils and better and larger premises by two steps. Today the school building (built 1987) a very practical an beautiful wooden house, more like a culture-centre of the village with it´s 20-25 pupils and four teachers, cook (free school-dinner in Finland since 1948!), a maintainer and cleaning-lady. The house includes a church, a gym, a library, a workshop, a meeting-hall and classrooms for many purposes: adult studies, meetings, seminars, workshops etc. Village people have taken the house of their own, and take good care of it and use it a lot, specially in the winter, when it might get chilly outside. Or how would you like to ski, when it is -40 centigrade?
In 1994 after a few years debate we were lucky to be able to start secondary school education in Kilpisjärvi, then with six pupils added to the lot. The help of Helsinki University´s teacher training school and the still going strong- distant education with videoconferencing was the last drop to ensure the enlargement of our school range from primary added with secondary, too. Before 1994 the Kilpisjärvi children at the age of 13 had to move to the centre of the municipality, Hetta, 180 km´s away, for boarding-school. The parents and other villagers determined wish came true: no more boarding-school! Kilpisjärvi school is as a by-product carrying the heavy load of a world record in distant-teaching (and learning!) by videoconferencing. We do it by stimulating the classroom of a teacher in Helsinki and pupils in Kilpisjärvi and Helsinki. This has been going on for 14 years with over 5000 lessons, six generations of pupils aged 13-16 years and four generations of videoconferencing equipment! At these years the school has had between 19 and 26 pupils altogether. The amount of teachers has stabilized to four: two primary-school teachers, language teacher and a science teacher plus one part-time teacher.
So late as in 1999 the Finnish government started funding the Sámi lingual teaching in the Sámi region in Finnish Lapland. Then one of our primary-teachers started to maintain at least 50% of the education in Sámi language with two pupils. The biggest problems in Sámi school are the lack of original educational material and the uneven status of the minority language in the municipality and in the pupils free-time and life outside of their classroom. Most of the materials and books in use are direct translations of Finnish books. They are made in the very south of Finland and do not concern too much of our own area or issues at all, starting from the nature, people, living conditions or livelihood. It takes a lot of extra work for a teacher to make his/her own material for the students. The students are not too many but on many different ages, which makes the work more tricky again. And the nearest Sámi colleague is 110 km´s away!
On the whole, thou, the school is cosy, safe, creative, beautiful, functioning, liked, with good results, respected, active and future-oriented, although how bad news from the Finnish school we have heard even this autumn. We offer the full range of compulsory education in Finnish and in Sámi languages, and we are only four full-time teachers! Anybody is welcome to try it! These sad and needless tragedies in Finnish schools are a product of, I may say, too efficient school-system, which closes it´s eyes from the most important: the way we treat each other!
You, dear readers, are most welcome to visit Finland and Finnish Lapland, to the end of the Arm of Finland, to Kilpisjärvi village and our dear Kilpisjärvi school!
