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The Pohijs-Savo Higher Technical School unites vocational schools and institutes of various profiles: the college of hotel and restaurant management (in the picture - a lesson for future bartenders), the school of medicine and social work. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

Ten kilometers from the small Kitee railway station, standing in the middle of a dense pine forest, is the Kitee Agricultural College, whose history dates back to 1877. About 100 people study here in vocational technical programs, twice as many study in polytechnic programs (the college is part of the Higher Technical School of North Karelia). Several years ago, the Kitee Training College participated in a Russian-Finnish project for training farmers, for which the Finnish government allocated 250 thousand dollars (from the Russian side, among others, the 91st vocational school of the Podolsk region was involved in the project). The project ended ingloriously. The college teachers who supervised the trainees from the Moscow and Tver regions know that their studies did not benefit them - none of them ever created farms in Russia.

A dozen and a half buildings are scattered throughout the territory: student dormitories (Finnish houses or flat one-story buildings resembling bungalows), small classroom buildings, workshops, premises for livestock and even a knacker, and behind the fence are plowed fields. Kitee Agricultural College is not only an educational institution, but also a large farm, where hired workers work together with the students (they can’t do it alone). Milk, meat and vegetables are sold.

Deputy director Pentti Ojajärvi shows us the newly built barn. Feeding and milking are automatic; the farmer controls the process while sitting at the computer. Before entering the barn, Finnish farmers put on plastic slippers - the aisles between the stalls are as clean as in a surgical room.

In the afternoon there were many students in the college, although classes had long ended. Some tinkered with equipment in the workshops, others sat at the computers with which the college is literally filled; several people were playing squash in the gym. In one of the rooms about twenty people were arguing animatedly. It turns out that a business plan was being drawn up: a student organization opened a kiosk in the college hall to sell manufactured goods imported from the city. Profits are spent on excursions, to which everyone is invited on weekends.

In the late afternoon, a rural idyll reigns on campus. It smells like hay and manure. Two girls are leading a horse by the bridle, two others are digging into the tractor engine. No music from the windows, no drunken company. It feels like no one drinks or even smokes here. But at one of the student houses I notice two wine bottles filled to the brim with cigarette butts, and cigarette butts are scattered in the clearing next to the house.


Kitee Agricultural College deputy director Pentti Ojajärvi, a cattle breeding specialist, is especially proud of the barn, which cost the Finnish state almost half a million dollars. Each cow has a collar with a personal number and a plate with a barcode in its ear. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

Peteushnik in Finnish
More than half of the students at Kitee College are the children of farmers who will continue the work of their parents. A farmer is a general specialist, therefore, regardless of their main specialty, students are required to study all types of agricultural production: work with plants, animals, and equipment (only practice in the animal farm is optional). Admission to certain specialties (livestock husbandry, agricultural machinery, logging, environmental protection, etc.) does not depend on gender: boys and girls equally learn to care for livestock and repair tractors. There is no concept of a “classroom” in college - everyone draws up their own curriculum (there are many elective courses in the program) and studies in different groups.

The number of general education disciplines and the level of requirements of the Finnish vocational school cannot be compared with the Finnish twelve-year lyceum. Despite this, future tractor drivers and livestock breeders learn several foreign languages: Swedish (the second state language), English, and some others of their choice. Several people at Kitee College study Russian as an elective along with Polytech students (the Russian city of Sortavala is located 100 kilometers from Kitee, and there is active trade between them). Russian teacher Valentina Luigent is pleased with the success of her students, although in Russian they have difficulty pronouncing even a couple of routine phrases.

I am trying to find students who, like in Russia, get a working profession only because they are not hired anywhere else. Efforts are in vain - everyone has motivation. Anna, a red-haired twenty-something with a cell phone clipped to her jeans, recently graduated as a kindergarten teacher from another college. He receives a second education due to family circumstances. “My husband is also studying here, he is a future farmer,” the girl says proudly. “When he receives his diploma, his parents will give him the farm.” About ten minutes later, Anna finds me in the college hallway and clarifies: “We haven’t gotten married yet, but we live and work together.”

Sixteen-year-old Riku, a forestry student, sits late every day in the computer lab surfing the Internet. He studies to continue the family business: his father is an entrepreneur and sells logs. Riku has been going to the forest with him since childhood and knows a lot about wood, and in the future he plans to work in his father’s company.

Other stories are similar. Finnish paramedics differ from their Russian peers in that they have a great idea of ​​their future path in life and do not doubt for a minute the prestige of the profession they are receiving.

Sweet life
It is unlikely that any of the guests of the three-star Savonia Hotel in the city of Kuopio (the tourist center of Eastern Finland, surrounded on all sides by lakes) knows that the hotel belongs to the Pohijs-Savo Technical High School. In the unoccupied part of the hotel there are computer classes, study bars and a student canteen. Students undergo practical training in the hotel restaurant under the guidance of master chefs. The main attraction of Kuopio is considered to be the Puojo Tower - an eighty-three-meter television tower on a hill, on the thirteenth floor of which there is a restaurant slowly rotating around its axis (like Seventh Heaven in Ostankino), which the local authorities also transferred into the ownership of the Pohijs-Savo Polytechnic and where they do their internships future administrators and waiters. The Pohijs-Savo High School, like other polytechnics, is multidisciplinary: in addition to tourism specialties, it trains social workers, designers, forestry and agricultural specialists.

Olga Yulhya, nee Shibko, is a third-year vocational student studying to become a waitress. Several years ago, having married a Finnish builder, she came to Kuopio from the Belarusian city of Baranovichi. She graduated from a culinary college in her home country. In Finland, with my Belarusian diploma, I couldn’t find a job, but as soon as I entered college, I easily got a job as a waitress in a bar at a local club. Olga readily compares the two education systems. “In the Baranovichi technical school, the requirements for behavior were stricter. If you’re a minute late, you won’t be allowed into class. But here you can say anything to the teacher, and during the lecture you can even lie down on your desk.” Olga is delighted with the material and technical base of the Finnish college: “The equipment here is good, the kitchens are awesome.” One of the classrooms is a model of a bar: next to the rows of desks there is a real bartender's stand, and on shelves along the wall there are several hundred empty bottles with labels of various alcoholic drinks. “In Baranovichi, the teachers are more demanding, it was more difficult to study there. But here it’s easy,” Olga argues. “The teachers of the “peteushniks” are spared. And in general, life is such that everything is ready for you - you don’t have to think about money or housing, "No one believes me when I tell you that at the technical school we brought food from home for practical classes."

We met another Russian student when Ilka Toroi and the vice-rector of the college spent a good hour winding in a Passat along dirt roads in search of a place where lumberjacks practiced, coordinating the route every ten minutes via mobile phone. In the thickets of the forest, a group of freshmen in blue-green overalls, under the guidance of a master with a thick red beard, learned to cut tree branches with long hand saws so that the logs would be thicker and of better quality. One of the students introduced himself as “Lekha Korobeinikov from Petrozavodsk”: “The trick was that the school needed Russian students who knew Finnish. And I taught it from the second grade - in many schools in Petrozavodsk this is a common subject.” (Finnish companies need Russian specialists with a Finnish logging diploma - the northern regions of Russia supply timber to Finland.) Last year, Lekha Korobeinikov entered the forest engineering faculty of Petrozavodsk University, but when the opportunity arose to go to Finland, he did not hesitate to take an academic leave.

Alexey is not embarrassed that in Kuopio he is studying not to become an engineer, but to become a simple worker (lumberjack, sawyer and feller), because studying is fun. “In Russia we used two-handed saws “Druzhba” or “Ural”: sawdust flies into your eyes, after an hour you stall and you can’t straighten your back; but here the saws are engines with handles, you don’t feel them in your hands. The tree itself flies into the air, jumps and will fit in as it should." In Finland, they teach only those theoretical disciplines that are related to the future profession: “There are no unnecessary subjects here. Why, for example, does a lumberjack need chemistry or physics? Those who are interested in them can optionally study them in the second year. But mathematics is mandatory for everyone , because they teach different calculations during logging." Another feature of Finnish education, in his opinion, is that here “no money is spared for anything”: “Every day two or three cars, each with five students, go to practice. Gasoline, depreciation, driver’s salary - per day for "One car costs 60 marks (about 10 dollars - B.S.). In general, they don't save gas. They don't turn off the engine, even when they stop for lunch."


At the School of Medicine and Social Work, students showed us the training room for nurses specializing in dentistry. One of them (pictured on the left) turned out to be a graduate of the Petrozavodsk medical school; in Finland she is studying to become a periodontist. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )

Supply and demand
The huge hall of the Helsinki City College of Technology resembles a theater foyer. The impression is enhanced by the steep spiral staircase leading to the upper floors (if there were such a thing in a Russian vocational school, accidents would inevitably occur). The college was formed about a year ago by uniting several educational institutions in Helsinki (there are 2,300 students and about 1,000 adults in various vocational training courses), teaching workers here - from electricians and plumbers to printers and telephone operators.

College director Pekka Kolehmainen says that, according to demographic forecasts, by 2010 Finnish businesses will have a labor shortage of about half a million people. In order to preserve industry and the service sector, the state allocates money for the training of emigrants (Finland grants the right to repatriation to those with Finnish roots). A large group of emigrants from Russia is undergoing professional retraining at the College of Technology (they learn Finnish along with other subjects, practically from scratch). Steelmaker from Chelyabinsk Sergei Regonen and overseas sailor from St. Petersburg Alexander Purdinen are retraining as welders to later work in shipyards. The impressions from studying are the same as those of Russian college students in Kuopio: “There is no such equipment in Russia and probably never will be,” “The courses are very well structured,” “They don’t spare money for studying.” Sergey and Alexander are not worried about their employment - the welding profession is one of those in short supply, and jobs are guaranteed for them.

Dozens of civil servants are involved in labor demand forecasts in Finland. Recently, the National Directorate of Education released a collection of “Demand for Specialists in Finland until 2010,” which charts the development of employment in various industries from 1970 to 2000 and a forecast until 2010, compiled on the basis of special methods. For example, the number of people employed in agriculture and the forestry industry is falling from year to year, while in health care and social work, on the contrary, it is growing. Based on such forecasts, the National Directorate of Education regulates the structure of specialties in schools. Although, of course, it is impossible to achieve one hundred percent accuracy of forecasts. “There is not a single country in the world where there is a balance between labor demand and supply,” says Jukka Sarjala, Director General of the National Education Directorate. “In the early 90s, we considered that we needed to train three times more engineers than "before. Now it is clear that their number had to be increased fivefold."

Having joined the EU, Finland reduced its acreage and livestock (the EU provides subsidies to farmers to prevent overproduction of agricultural products), and agricultural schools began to train not only farmers, but also specialists in ecology, forest processing and other related professions. In recent years, the country has seen a leap in the field of information technology (in terms of the share of income from high-tech exports, Finland ranks third in the world after the USA and Japan), which indicates that specialists in this industry are well trained. When exports of footwear and textiles to the Soviet Union declined in the 1980s, many garment factories ceased operations, and textile vocational schools were immediately closed or repurposed. Due to general computerization, the need for low-skilled personnel has disappeared - the training of typists and telephone operators has been curtailed, and the training of tellers for banking and insurance companies has been reduced.

For Russians, access to Finnish vocational education is complicated due to the language barrier. However, those who speak Finnish can easily get into colleges and polytechnics. At the Agricultural College of Kitee we met a guy from St. Petersburg who came here on his own, passed the exams, and was accepted to study for free. At first he lived with friends in the neighboring city of Joensuu, then moved to the college campus. They pay a stipend, food and accommodation are free. Having learned that we were journalists from Russia, he was seriously frightened: “Just don’t write that they take Russians here for free! They will come in droves! Can you imagine what will happen then?”

Kitee - Kuopio - Helsinki - Moscow


Graduates of the College of Hotel and Restaurant Management receive a diploma as a waiter, cook and administrator - they will probably have to work in small hotels where the employee is the same in all persons. In the photo: industrial practice in the restaurant of the Savonia Hotel. (Photo: Pavel Gorshkov )