Finland regularly ranks as a world leader in media literacy, with its population well equipped to deal with misinformation, disinformation and many of the threats the digital age poses to democracy.
It is the result of an education system that differs greatly from Irish schooling. Finnish students do not enter formal education until the age of seven. Each year, they are set goals and principles in place of any regular examinations. And, with the topic integrated into the subjects on their curriculum, they learn to become media literate.
The Finnish early childhood education and care programme incorporates basic elements of media literacy around books and images for toddlers younger than three years old. By the time they enter primary school, the child’s critical thinking has developed further.
“You understand that everything you see in the picture is not everything that has happened,” says Leo Pekkala, deputy director of Finland’s National Audiovisual Institute, which oversees media education.
“Basic elements lead into understanding. Then at a later age, when you’re a teenager, you start to make news articles and video news. You can make a script, and you learn to understand the selection process that journalists have to [go through].
“What do I take into the story? What is it that I leave out? Do I have some agenda that I want to bring forward? Basically, it’s building from very simple things up to the end of secondary level where your cognitive thinking skills are already at a very high level, and you can understand very abstract things along that path.”
Finland’s national core curriculum gives overall principles and goals, but its implementation is left in the hands of the teachers. It is a model that dates back to the 1970s, when the country launched an education reform to abolish school fees and regular national examinations.
Media literacy was introduced, then referred to as mass communication education, and was based on a recognition that young people were spending more time engaging with media. At that time, it was mainly concerned with books, newspapers and television.
Pekkala suggests its success has hinged on media literacy being embedded in the curriculum and not set aside as its own subject. Classes benefit too, he says, from the absence of regular, continuous exams as teachers have the freedom to discuss contemporary, developing issues without having to adhere to a rigid course outline.
“I’m sure there are a lot of teachers in Finland discussing, for example, what X has done and what Meta has now announced they will be doing [ending fact-checking]. They don’t need to test that knowledge with the students, but they want to educate the children and discuss these issues.”
While critical thinking is at the centre of media literacy, an understanding of the value of informed media is just as important as a willingness to question the information that media disseminates.
The Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report for 2024 lists Finland as the country with the highest level of overall trust in news (69 per cent). In the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it is among the highest-ranking countries for levels of public trust. Nina Penttinen, counsellor of education at the Finnish National Agency for Education, believes accountability is crucial.
“I think it’s really important in this current atmosphere that the students understand that there are media who are following journalistic rules, and they are self-critical, and they correct [themselves] if they are [spreading] misinformation,” she says.
“And then there are platforms who are not doing that. The relationship between democracy and media and reliable information – I think it’s really important nowadays. We are trying to promote that sort of teaching in schools.”
Leo Pekkala suggests the Finnish language has been a welcome shield against information manipulation from foreign sources. Penttinen fears that the growing influence of artificial intelligence (AI) has changed things.
“Before AI, I think that was the case,” Penttinen says. “If there were, let’s say, different political agencies making propaganda, there usually was a problem with the language that you could quite easily [recognise] it was not made by a Finnish person.
“What gives Finland the most resilience to disinformation is maybe our history. Propaganda and disinformation are not new phenomena but have always been produced by various state and non-state actors.
“By understanding history, you can also put things in context and critically evaluate different sources. In Finland, resilience towards disinformation is perhaps also strengthened by our history as a small democratic nation sharing a long border with our eastern neighbour.”
Though efforts to tackle disinformation were ramped up in 2014, Finland’s education model has been around for half a century.
Dr Eileen Culloty, deputy director at the DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society, points out the difficulties Ireland would face in introducing media literacy to schools.
“The challenge is that the curriculum is already massively overcrowded,” she says. “If you were talking to somebody about climate change or science or health, they’d say we need health literacy or climate literacy. You can go on and on, and who’s to say whether one thing is more valuable than another?
“The other big challenge we found in some work we did is around training of teachers. It’s all well and good for people to say that teachers should be teaching media literacy. But have the teachers been taught how to teach media literacy? Was that part of their curriculum when they were training? Generally, it isn’t, and the curriculum that teachers have to go through is also very jam-packed.”
Teachers in Finland are trusted to convey topics like disinformation and misinformation to students as they see fit, but that kind of freedom comes with the responsibility of being highly informed on a wide range of topics around media literacy.
“When we talk about media literacy, what exactly is it that we mean? It’s very broad,” says Culloty. “From a teacher’s perspective, that could be talking about algorithms and AI; it could be talking about how influencer content is influencing young people’s perspective or their ideas about cosmetic surgery or their appearance. It’s so broad. I’m not sure that it’s realistic to expect any individual teacher to have competencies across all of these areas. That’s the huge challenge with it.”
Dr Colman Noctor is a child and adolescent psychotherapist who believes media literacy needs to be added to the Irish curriculum. Noctor acknowledges that greater resources would have to be provided for teachers tasked with introducing the topic.
“I think media literacy needs to be integrated in all subjects, whether it be business, religion or even PE ... I would see it in English; I would see it in history. We need to be making contemporary comparisons to media in almost everything that we talk about.”
‘It’s crucial’: News literacy programme rolls out across Irish schools
Almost 10,000 transition year students from more than 200 schools nationwide have signed up for the 2025 Young Journalist Ireland programme (youngjournalist.ie) which aims to develop critical news literacy skills in young people.
The programme, established by NewsBrands Ireland, teaches students to understand the principles and ethics of fact-based journalism and to think critically like a journalist by questioning information sources.
It also encourages students to create their own journalism with advice and resources from journalists on how to create a school newspaper, write an impactful opinion piece, match report or feature article on a local issue.
NewsBrands Ireland chief executive Ann-Marie Lenihan said: “To combat disinformation and misinformation, it’s crucial for young people to learn how to distinguish credible news sources from unreliable ones, and understanding the standards and protocols followed by professional journalists is essential in this process.”
Registration is open for Young Journalist Ireland 2025 and schools receive lesson plans; free subscriptions to Irish news websites; and news literacy workshops for teachers in partnership with Oide, the support service for teachers.
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