Brilio.net/en - Bahasa Indonesia will become an elective foreign language course for university students at Turun Yliopisto (the University of Turku) in Finlandia starting the new school year in August 2016. The agreement was announced by the University of Turkus rector, Professor Kalervo Vaananen in a meeting with the Indonesian ambassador to Finland, Elias Ginting.
As quoted from Antara News, Vaananen specially invited the Indonesian ambassador to discuss about the planning of Bahasa Indonesia as a subject. The reason is because people in Finland have been getting more and more interested in learning Bahasa Indonesia as a language spoken by more than 320 million speakers in the world.
According to the director of language center in the University of Turku, Mike Nelson, Bahasa Indonesia will be offered for university students as part of their foreign language offerings which includes others languages such as Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Chinese, and Russian.
The University of Turku is one of the oldest universities in Finland with 25,000 local students and about 1,000 international students. The Bahasa Indonesia course will be the first of its kind in Finland.
Indonesia should be proud that the educational philosophy from Ki Hajar Dewantara, an Indonesian educational icon, is applied in Finlands school. The system had been used in Finland ever since they reformed their educational system some 20 years ago.
Other countries had looked at our problems so that we have to make a change similar to that of Finland. They made a change in their educational system for 20 years starting from the beginning of 1980 to 2000,said Culture and Elementary and Secondary Education Minister (Menbud Dikdasmen) Anies Baswean when giving an explanation to the Head of Educational Department in the Kemdikbuds office, Senayan, Jakarta, Monday (1/12).
The philosophy of Ki Hajar Dewantara was actually practiced in Finland, said Anies.