They proposed also that in upper secondary school students should learn two foreign languages in addition to the two official languages. It is clear that the propositions were excessive but the commission studied a number of important questions such as : How many languages one should learn ? When should one start learning a language ? Which language would be the easiest for the Finns? How many hours should one study languages in a week ? Should the language be taught in a foreign language or in Finnish ? And so on.
These questions have created the basis for the education of languages in Finland and some of them come to consideration even today, and even more in the 90’s when new kinds of training programs were planned, for example the IB (International Baccalaureate).
Anyway, it seems that Finland was one of the first countries in Europe to pose these kind of questions. Besides, the educational objectives that concern all European countries since the 1990’s have been attained in Finland 20 years before.
In the 1980’s in secondary school, the objective was that at least 35% of students would chose one optional language. The Council of State was hoping that this language would more often be French or Russian. In upper secondary school, 80% of the students studied one optional language during the 1990’s.
That was good, but there was one problem: the unbalance of choice. This is the reason why the Ministry of Education National was preparing new objectives: teaching of German, French, Russian and Spanish should augment at all the educational levels. They thought that the cultural relations demanded language knowledge and the attitudes towards the European countries would be more positives if we knew their languages.
The students were encouraged to choose another language than English as their first foreign language, but actually we have been able to notice that English is the language that the students find the most important as first foreign language. In 90’s, students studied in upper secondary school on the average 2.7 foreign languages. Of the baccalaureates, girls passed ¾ of the optional language exams.