EDUCATION-FINLAND: Study Focuses On Immigrant Youth Problems

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Linus Atarah

HELSINKI, Jun 12 2004 (IPS) - Mohamed is a Somali immigrant in his early twenties. He has not only completed the Finnish comprehensive school but also found a job as security guard at a super market here.

While he is trying to figure out where to go next on the education ladder, many other Somalis of his age find no alternative to hanging around at public places, uncertain of what the future has in store for them.

They have mostly dropped out of school and cannot find jobs.

Anne Alitolppa-Niitamo, a psychologist and an anthropologist, has made the situation of Somali immigrants in Finland the subject of her doctoral dissertation titled ‘The Ice Breakers’.

Alitolppa-Niitamo warns of an “immigrant youth problem” and predicts adverse consequences for the Finnish society as a whole unless the educational system is restructured to handle the special needs of immigrants.

She also warns that the sight of many unemployed immigrant youth loitering around in public places would cause an anti-immigrant backlash in the Finnish population at large.

The study published here early this month is significant in two respects. It is the first of its kind in Finland that focuses on Somalis who immigrated in their teens to Finland. The author describes them as “the generation in between”.

Alitolppa-Niitamo also provides an insight into the formal educational path of the one category of asylum seekers who have made a noticeable change in the social map of Finland, the Somali youth.

Says Alitolppa-Niitamo: The problem is that many of Somali youth in their early teens arriving in the country in the 1990s had very little and fragmented schooling due to the chaotic war situation in Somalia.

The Finnish education system did not take this into account and wrongly assumed that they would easily adjust themselves. But they did not. Most found it very difficult to cope with and could not advance beyond basic three-year comprehensive school.

No official statistics are available on how many immigrant children drop out of school annually in Finland. But Alitolppa-Niitamo, who conducted her study among Somalis, describes the problem as critical.

The personal story of Mohamed reflects the overall situation confronted by the young Somali asylum seekers.

Arriving in Finland at the age of 12 he received one year of teaching in Finnish language and was placed in the seventh grade along with Finnish pupils – though Mohamed had only attended a Koranic school back home and undergone less than two years of secular schooling.

“Initially it was very difficult”, he said. “I had a bare working knowledge of Finnish, and yet I was expected to follow all the courses in mathematics and everything else.”

Mohamed has managed to scramble through the basic comprehensive school which is compulsory in Finland but his grade was not sufficient to continue to a higher level. He does not know what to do next.

The situation faced by Somali youth immigrants also reflects the challenges Finland is confronted with.

Until the 1980s Finland was very much a homogenous society with only a few foreigners here and there. In fact, those days it was common to compare this 5-million strong Nordic nation unfavourably with Albania as having the least number of foreigners in Europe.

But all that changed in the beginning of the 1990s when for the first time Somali asylum seekers fleeing the civil war in their country began arriving in large numbers. It was the first time that Finland had to handle a relatively large number of unexpected asylum seekers.

In the year 2002 the total number of foreigners living in Finland was 69,397, according to official statistics. Somalis, one of the biggest ethnic minorities, number 2,274. But unemployment among them is 58 per cent.

A large proportion of Somalis are also young: 57 percent are under 20.

It is not surprising therefore, Alitolppa-Niitamo told IPS, that many Finnish institutions including the educational system without previous experience of handling large group of foreigners have been faced with a major challenge.

At the time of their arrival in Finland, in the beginning of the 1990s, the educational policy designed for immigrants emphasized “normalization”, meaning that maximum use of the mainstream school system was favoured over segregated or tailored responses, Alitolppa-Niitamo said.

The policy was in line with a core principle of Nordic welfare system which discourages non-segregation in the provision of social services in the belief that it would lead to equality.

But Alitolppa-Niitamo questions that policy with regards to immigrants, arguing that assimilative and homogenizing policy in some cases seemed to result in exclusion than inclusion.

“Apart from different socio-cultural backgrounds, Somali students often differed from mainstream expectations also in terms of their family and prior educational backgrounds.”

For instance most Somali parents, even though while appreciating formal education highly, were unable to assist their children with schoolwork because they, unlike Finnish parents, had no education.

As Mohamed put it, “how could my parents help me with my school homework when they were struggling to learn the Finnish language? They had to take care of their problems while I took care of mine.”

“There is a serious risk that these young immigrants would fall out of society and become marginalized and would eventually form an underclass which is contrary to the values of a social welfare state”, Alitolppa-Niitamo said.