INVISIBLE | Session 5 | Finland | Marko Koskinen, Phoenix Online School

Marko Koskinen, 47yo, from Finland is the founder of Phoenix Online School, a K9 elementary homeschooling alternative for students in Finland. During years 2017-2019 Marko was a member of the Council of the European Democratic Education Community (EUDEC) and has been an active member of the Democratic Education community for over two decades.

Marko began his revolutionary education career as a student at the Helsinki University by initiating a student movement at the Helsinki University Education department demanding change in the teaching practices. The end result was a formation of a new kind of teacher education line, where the teacher students decide themselves about their curriculum. There are no tests and the evaluation is mostly based on peer evaluation and mentoring.

Marko has worked as a teacher in pre-primary, primary, secondary and adult education for 15 years. His experience has led him to affirm the many critiques towards the education system he already had when he moved from ITC to education field in his early twenties. The main critiques include age segregation, hierarchical governing system, evaluation systems based on rewards and punishments, pre-designed curriculum and the focus on academics instead of well-being.

In 2001 Marko participated in an internship program at a private K12 democratic alternative school, Sudbury Valley School, in MA, USA. This experience helped him start his own school in Finland in 2005. The Phoenix School was operational for three years. After the school closed down, during years 2009-2010 Marko travelled for four months in India and studied some Indian philosophers like Sri Aurobindo and Krishnamurti.

In 2010 Marko started working on the online school. As an ICT professional he was able to combine Information Technology with education and in 2011 the Phoenix Online School was officially released.

The aim of the online school was to allow easy access to homeschooling. During his years as a teacher in public education sector, Marko had seen in practice the many problems of the education system. Even though the Finnish education system is considered to be one of the best in the world, it still has most of the same structures as other education systems and suffers the same problems stated above. With the online school Marko wanted to create a system that would put the student in the center of his/her own studies and give the student and the family as much freedom as possible while still fulfilling the mandatory national curriculum. The solution was to abolish all study content and give the student only questions and tasks. The student was free to decide how to study, when to study, with whom to study and due to the flexibility of the system, also in a great degree, what to study.

The Phoenix Online School has been now running for ten years and at the moment has about 90 students, which is about 20% of the homeschoolers in Finland. The online platform has also been successfully tested in regular classroom settings inside Finnish and Spanish public schools.