COVID-19 and the commercialization of Finnish schooling: A national "digileap" and a global reimagining of digitalized public schooling




Kiesi, Iida; Hogan, Anna

Santalova Antonina, Põder Kaire

PublisherOxford University Press

2024

Privatization in and of Public Education

263

280

978-0-19-767350-8

978-0-19-767353-9

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197673508.003.0013



Finland is often promoted as having a “successful” public school system that has protected itself through strong state regulations from the narrow logic of the global education reform movement. However, over the course of the COVID-19 emergency, we see evidence of the Finnish edu-ecosystem rapidly mobilizing a commercial response to the crisis. In this chapter, we follow this edu-ecosystem, made up of edu-businesses, publishing houses, consultancies, state actors, and newly emerged coalitions to chart how they used the pandemic as an opportunity for an immediate “digileap” in Finnish schooling and a longer-term reimagining of the global school system in which Finnish edtechs are leading the digitalization of schooling (on a for-profit basis). We argue that commercial edtech is being used to deliver new forms of online, blended, or hybrid systems of public schooling and call for an urgent debate about what this means for the understanding of publicness in Finnish schooling.



Last updated on 2025-27-01 at 19:58