Parents' Views on the Comprehensive School and its Development: a Finnish study

This study set out to explore Finnish parents' attitudes towards ongoing educational reforms and to investigate their satisfaction with the functioning of comprehensive schools. The subjects were a nationwide sample of parents (n = 563). It was found that the parents' appraisal of Finnish comprehensive schools is fairly positive, as can be seen in both their attitudes and their evaluations of satisfaction. The basic tenets of the market ethos were rejected rather than supported, and the parents expressed concern about educational inequality and the harmful consequences of competition. Two attitude patterns could be detected, that of selec-tiveness and that of comprehensiveness; the former was endorsed mainly by middle-class parents and the latter mainly by working-class parents. It was concluded that there are two important concepts in Finnish educational discourse, that of giftedness and that of equality, which seem to open two rather different, and socially differently anchored, perspectives.