This chapter describes how Finland has progressed from being a poor, agrarian, and only modestly educated nation to a modern, knowledge-based society with a high-performing education system and a world-class innovation environment. Expanding access to education from early childhood education all the way to the highest academic degrees and adult learning has been a long-term ideal in Finnish society. This chapter first provides a historic and political context for realization of this Finnish Dream. It then describes the evolution of the unified comprehensive basic school, or peruskoulu as it is called in Finnish, and some principles of upper-secondary education that are an important part of Finnish educational success. Present structures and policies of the Finnish education system are briefly outlined at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 1 explains both the political and historical realities in Finland after World War II and how they shaped the move toward the idea of common basic school for all by the end of the 1960s. In telling the story of educational change in Finland to scores of foreign visitors, I have learned that it is important to go back further in time than the birth of peruskoulu (I use this Finnish term because there isn’t an English equivalent to it) in 1970. Chapter 1 illustrates the process of reforming the old school system, which divided pupils into two tracks and relied heavily on privately gov- erned and cofinanced grammar schools, into a comprehensive, publicly managed and funded system. It also outlines the main features of upper- secondary education that emerged soon after implementing the perusk- oulu reform in the late 1970s. The main characteristics of the iconic Finnish Matriculation Examination, a high-stakes test students take when they leave general upper-secondary education in Finland, are also described in this chapter.