This thesis is commissioned by Finnish Forest Association. The thesis is one part of the project called Kestävästi metsäsuhteessa, the meaning of which is to study the Finnish attitude to forest in these days and which factors have an influence on those relations. Executors of this project are the Finnish Forest Association and LUSTO – The Finnish forest museum.

In this thesis I investigate school books of the comprehensive school on environmental science, biology and geography were studied. What kind of attitude to forest will be forwarded and how those observe forestry? At first the selection process of the books and the research methods are described. This thesis is a phenomenological and hermeneutic research about those books. In the research the quiddity of the books is figured out. Four themes to make clear the characters of the books are used. Those themes are utilism, humanism, mystism and naturism.

This thesis reveals that books that were studied, which obey the core cur-riculum for the basic education 2014, follow the neutral way to educate students about the forest context. The main results are that books for younger students are more humane than the ones for the older students (books on biology and geography), which are more like nature-oriented. The extension of the research which studies how students and teachers experience those books, could give more information about forestry and forest attitude in school books.