Finland

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

Want Your Kids To Achieve The American Dream? Move To Finland

It’s interesting to see how two other countries with different “cultures” react to the pressures of the world when they are not consumed by the viagra of greed as our “99-1” society is. An article in the Sept. 22 LA Times revealed that Japanese citizens in the three prefectures (counties)  most seriously damaged by the earthquake-tsunami had recovered more than 5,700 personal safes from businesses and homes. One resident went into the damaged living room of her home and found an envelope floating in the muck containing Japanese yen worth $40,000. Another found $26,000 in a purse in the debris.

One family found a safe from a business and called the police. A locksmith opened the door after considerable work and discovered over $1.3 million.  All in all, Japanese have turned over more than $48 million in loose cash to the government, with $30 million more found in safes.  Over $24 million of the loose cash and all but $500,000 found in safes has been returned to owners.

Finders Are Not Necessarily Keepers

It seems remarkable that many “finders” have given up all rights to found money although ownership is difficult to track in an area that suffered over 25,000 dead and missing. According to Japanese law, unclaimed money becomes property of the government after three months. Government agents in charge of the collection, identification, and return of money and valuables said that finders insist they want the money or valuables to go to the owner or family. Police and fire personnel have recovered much of the cash while looking for bodies in the debris.

The safe with the $1.3 million? The owner of the business distributed the entire amount to his surviving employees. He said: “It’s not about personal gain here. Everyone has suffered in this tsunami.”

The LA reporters cited a University of Michigan experiment in the recovery of lost property conducted in 2003. Twenty wallets with approximately $20 in cash were left on the streets of New York and Tokyo. In New York six wallets of the 20 were returned with cash.  In Tokyo all but two of the 20 were returned with cash. It’s not a big research sample but it is still revealing about the two societies. A researcher from England’s University of Cambridge recently spent over a month observing Japanese who had lost homes in the tsunami. She said the Japanese seemed to be driven toward honesty necessary for social “cohesion.”  In other words, cultural training provides the incentive for turning in property and cash to authorities. The lesson of social cohesion conquers greed in Japan.

Finland and its Forty-Year Plan

Our 308 million could learn a lot from a country of 5.4 million.  Forty years ago the Finns determined if they were ever going to compete economically while leaving no children behind they would have to concentrate on education.  To accomplish this goal they provide a free education for qualified citizens all the way through technical and university degrees. This is expensive but Finns believe in social cohesion, not self-aggrandizement or keeping wallets.

Early on the government decided that in order to give “professional respect” to teachers it would have to rank with other professions such as law, medicine, and business.

Later came a very unusual decision. The Finns declared that access to the Internet is a birthright and that every home in the country would be connected by high-speed broadband supplied and maintained by the government! It’s the only country in the world that has made that promise to its citizens.  This decision may seem strange to us, a country that has not even determined that a citizen has a birthright to health care. In fact, some of our citizens yell “ Let ‘em die!” for those who don’t have health insurance. So much for our style of social cohesion! We evidently are wallet keepers.

But look at the logic behind making Internet access a birthright for every citizen. Finland is a huge country, sparsely populated. Many people live in remote areas, far from post offices, banks, and schools. Good communications, accurate and timely banking, ready access for tourists, and research are educational and economic necessities. Parts of Finland have very high-speed broadband now and the Finnish government has a goal of every home with 100 mbps (megabytes per second speed) by 2015. South Korea currently leads the world with 22.46 mbps. We are now in 30th place at 7.78 mbps, behind such notables as Romania, Slovakia, Czech Republic, and Liechtenstein. When Bill Clinton left office we were third in the world. After the George W. Bush disaster we had sunk to 16th.  The Wall Street Great Recession brought us huge banking bonuses instead of high-speed broadband.

The Finns Leave No Child Behind

Finns pay high taxes but they don’t spend all their money building $22 billion aircraft carriers, $8 billion submarines, $412 million fighter planes, and spend a million dollars a year keeping each soldier in foreign adventures such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Finnish children do not turn up at school hungry and homeless. The schools provide food, medical care, counseling, and even taxi fare if needed. All student health care is free for the family. The state provides three years of maternity leave for the mother and subsidized day care for parents. All five-year-olds attend a preschool program that emphasizes play and socializing. Ninety-seven percent of six-year-olds attend public preschools where they begin to study academics. “Real” school begins at seven–and is compulsory.

In the beginning Finnish teachers spend fewer hours in school and less time in classrooms than American teachers do. Students play outside every day, even in cold winter weather. Finnish teachers will often teach the same students for five years. This practice means more work in preparation for classes, but teachers get to know the students and their parents intimately. First graders (age seven) take Finnish, math, science, music, art, sports, religion, and textile handcrafts. Students are required to learn Finnish, their second language Swedish, and a third language (English is the most popular). The third language is started at age nine.

Nearly 100 percent of ninth graders go on to the high school level where about 40 percent attend vocational high schools preparing for jobs in the trades and other occupations. Counselors and teachers work directly with parents in identifying the strengths and weaknesses of each student.

Class size?  Finland maintains a ratio of one teacher, assistant teacher, or aide for every seven students.  Special education teachers are required to have six years of university training in their fields (paid for by the state) and are paid slightly more than regular teachers.

How About Having Ten Applicants For Every Teaching Slot?

Finland draws its teachers from the top quartile of university students.  Before teaching they are required to complete a master’s degree—but it is completely paid for by the state at one of the eight state universities. More importantly, teachers have the same status as doctors and lawyers in Finnish society. Last year 6,600 applicants tried to fill only 660 empty slots in the schools.

National goals are established but all accountability and inspections are left to teachers and principals. Teachers decide who passes and who fails. There are no groupings by ability. No standardized tests are used.  As a matter of fact Finnish teachers laugh at the tests required by America’s Leave No Child Behind. Because of their structure and staffing the teachers say: “It’s nonsense. We know more about the children than these tests can tell us.”  The goals and guidelines for math in Grades 1-9 are a whopping ten pages. And Finnish teachers have strong, effective unions.

A note of interest: Norway has embraced U.S. education policies instead of Finnish.  Norway uses standardized tests like Leave No Child Behind does.  All of Norway’s scores are similar to U.S. scores. Lousy. Very few Norwegian teachers have master’s degrees either. Finnish students consistently score at the top of international tests in math, science, and reading literacy although it is the first standardized test they take at 15 years of age. U.S. students usually score around 15th place among the 41 countries that participate in the test.

U.S. Families: Increased Debt And Stagnant Salaries Over Two Decades

Why move to Finland if you have children? Because Finnish parents and students can dream while the American middle class has been left to wither away and rot. In the last 20 years middle class salaries in the U.S. have gone up three percent while middle class debt has risen 292 percent, college tuition has increased 73 percent and health insurance premiums have increased 182 percent.  There is no question the Republican Supreme Court, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the corporatocracy of Wall Street are destroying the middle class.

Finnish children have enough to eat. Over 17 million households in the United States harboring 17 million children have great difficulty acquiring enough healthy, nutritious food to eat. The Harvard School of Public Health has studied the close relationship between hunger and student achievement: “When children attend school inadequately nourished, their bodies conserve the limited food energy…Energy is first used for critical organ functions. If sufficient energy remains, it then is allocated for growth. The last priority is for social activity and learning. As a result, undernourished children become more apathetic and have impaired cognitive capacity.”  All this talk about “school reform” in the U.S. is actually obscene until we start feeding children adequately. Brains cannot function without brain food.

The Idiocy Of Leave No Child Behind

By 2014, if we continue to follow Leave No Child Behind, almost all elementary and secondary schools will be listed as absolute failures. That’s what happens when “Know-Nothing” politicians combine with assembly-line oriented corporate CEOs to determine educational policy. We need people who can think, not bolt on wheels to cars and ATVs on assembly lines. Robots do that 24/7 without back pain, repetitive motion problems, and pay raises. Great thinkers, valued judgmental employees, and great university students are not created by taking dozens of mind-numbing multiple-choice tests.
 
We need to experiment, analyze, conduct research , and to use all of our senses for discovery.  We all need music, art, drama, debate, speech, writing skills for problem-solving dream times.  Learning skills have been dramatically lowered to a mantra celebrating economic competition and good jobs. There’s more to life. Learning for the sake of learning is exhilarating, joyful, and opens our minds to thought and reason we can use for our short time on earth.
 
I’m afraid we have lost it. I found an anonymous poem that captures our 99-1 society. I am editing and revising it–but I don’t think I have lost its original punch:

“I see spree killings.                           
I see reality TV eating our souls.               
I see friends and families giving up.           
Giving up on their dreams.                     
Not remembering when they had any.         
Yesterday after work I lay in the dark.         
I thought about all the illnesses we have.     
I thought about the dreams for our children.     
I don’t see democracy working.
I don’t see capitalism working.
I don’t see our culture working.
I see the infighting and the culture wars.
I see continual fights on social issues.
I see no hope for the unemployed.
I thought about America’s depression.
I see no hope for the middle class.”

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