The Dividing School System and Vocational Guidance

The early 1960s was a time before the foundations for ‘the Nordic success story’ in education were laid.3 The families of the young people discussed in this chapter had already made a decision that greatly limited the range of choices available to the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds.

The entry requirements for secondary schools highlighted aptitude, but the division correlated strongly with the pupils’ socio-economic background: in the school year 1959–1960, less than thirty percent of pupils in lower secondary schools were from working-class families, and their share was even smaller in upper secondary schools, at only seventeen percent (HT 1962a). Unlike elementary schools, secondary schools had tuition fees.4 The Finnish system corresponded to the central European ‘elitist’ model and differed dramatically from the American education system, which offered secondary schooling to the majority of the age group already in the mid-1950s (Goldin and Katz 2008, 22–28.). Figure 7.2 illustrates the rapidly increasing popularity of secondary school in Helsinki.5

Figure 7.1 The selective school system in Finland in 1960

At the same time, thirteen-year-old to fifteen-year-old elementary school pupils began to be considered the ‘left-overs’ (Jauhiainen 2002, 225). While in the 1940s elementary school had been considered the gateway to working life for the majority, attitudes changed during the 1950s as employers valued formal education more highly than before.

The majority of elementary school pupils’ families were working class. In my samples, around two-thirds of the pupils’ families can be classified as working class based on the parents’ occupations. Three quarters of the fathers in the working-class families were skilled workers who most likely had learned their skills on the job and had no formal vocational education. A quarter of the fathers in working-class families were unskilled workers. The middle-class families’ fathers were mostly small entrepreneurs or foremen working in manufacturing.6

Elementary school pupils attended vocational guidance lessons at school once a week for the two last years of compulsory education. The lessons provided the young people with information about occupations and industries and sought to help them to recognise their own skills and abilities—as well as their shortcomings. The most important part of the vocational guidance was personal guidance. During the final school year, each pupil filled in specific forms and met with a guidance counsellor twice: first for a half-an-hour interview and the second time at the end of the spring semester for a shorter discussion. The counsellors were psychologists or sociologists by training.

The Employment Office in Helsinki began to provide systematic vocational guidance for all elementary school pupils in 1947. Models for the guidance activities were sought from abroad, primarily from Sweden. The number and the variety of occupations had grown, which meant that young people, on the one hand, could and, on the other hand, had to choose their occupation. As one vocational guidance textbook explained, the tradition of a son following in his father’s footsteps was no longer possible in the way it had been a hundred years before. Formal education was considered ever more important in the labour market, and vocational guidance stressed the importance of acquiring vocational skills. Everyone was considered to be the ‘maker of his own fortune’ (Hiisio et al.

The source material for this chapter consists of elementary schoolgirls’ and schoolboys’ vocational guidance records (files on elementary schoolgirls 1960; files on elementary schoolboys 1960). These include, among others, the forms the pupils filled in and the counsellors’ notes from the meetings. The counsellors asked the young people about their family, school performance, hobbies and friends, health, work experience, and—in particular—their plans concerning education and work. For example, they were asked which occupations they preferred and how they had learned about them, what occupations they would never want to engage in, whether any of their relatives had an occupation that interested them, and what their later plans were ‘regarding work and employment’. Both girls and boys filled in the same forms and responded to the same questions. The counsellors were also interested in the opinions of the pupils’ guardians. The guardians—usually the pupil’s parents—were asked what occupation they suggested for their child, and they had to provide some brief reasoning for their opinion.

Figure 7.2 The number of first-grade lower secondary school pupils and eleven-year-olds in Helsinki, 1950–1970 (HT 1956b, 1963b, 1971, 1973, 1954 and other equivalent tables in the statistical yearbooks of Helsinki)

The documents of each pupil have been collected in files, and each year’s files are archived alphabetically by sex and school type. Because all elementary schoolchildren received vocational guidance, the material is vast. Therefore, it was necessary to restrict the number of cases by selecting samples. I opted for the school year 1959–1960 because this was when the first baby boomers finished elementary school, and it was also the last year vocational guidance was still organised municipally.7 To further limit the abundant source material, I applied a systematic sampling method to collect every tenth case since the material was archived in a suitable manner to do this.

The vocational guidance documents offer a unique source material for researching a transitional phase of these young people’s lives. However, when analysing the documents, their original purpose must be comprehended, as with any source material. The official structure of the forms has restricted and channelled the young people’s expression, and the expectations of others have influenced their replies greatly. Parents, teachers, and vocational counsellors all had opinions of what the young person was like and what would be best or most suitable for him/her and the other people in the young person’s life. The two meetings with the counsellor were most likely somewhat intimidating and nerve-racking situations for the young people; the fifteen-year-olds met an adult—a prestigious expert, no less—who would tell them what they should become.

The forms and the interview notes taken by the counsellor provide thorough material for each pupil. The material is highly comparable, as the young people have all answered the same questions. The differences in the young people’s verbal skills do not affect the material as much as they might have had the source material instead consisted of essays, for example. Moreover, these documents give a unique perspective on a period when the young people had not yet made up their minds. In contrast to analysing only the eventual decisions, this kind of source brings forth the uncertainty and the existence of many possible futures, as well as the influence of other people in the decision-making. In addition to the vocational guidance documents, I apply statistics compiled by the City of Helsinki and Statistics Finland.