The Almost Nearly Perfect People

by Michael Booth

  ‘The Soviet embassy was, of course, extremely powerful and every Finnish politician had a Home Russian, a Soviet diplomat who became a very close friend: you invited them to your summer house, to family get-togethers,’ is how Kolbe put it.

  The relationship was mutually beneficial: ‘They gathered information on what we were doing, what the intellectuals and politicians were thinking, but everyone knew what the aim of these relationships was,’ says Kolbe. The Soviets especially valued any information the Finns picked up in London and New York while on business there.

  Neil Hardwick’s arrival in Finland coincided with the height of the Cold War. When we met in the bar of my hotel I asked him for his memories of Helsinki during that time. ‘Forty years ago it was very Eastern European and, basically, everything was forbidden except the things that were compulsory,’ he laughed. ‘Going out to a place like this would have been dreadful. You’d have had to queue up outside, there would have been a doorman, you’d buy your drink but you couldn’t go from one table to another if you saw a mate. You couldn’t just pick up your drink and walk over, you had to ask a waiter to take your drink for you. They covered the windows too, so that passers-by wouldn’t be able to see people drinking.’

  Russian influence on the lives of ordinary Finns was extraordinary. Every day the national radio station broadcast a fifteen-minute bulletin, a kind of ‘What’s happening with the neighbours’, according to Hardwick, filled with ‘gentle Soviet propaganda’. He also explained how every home had to keep something called a House Book, in which were recorded the names, not only of everyone who lived in the house, but of every visitor. Come January, a member of the household had to queue at the local police station where the books would be checked and stamped. Failure to do this would result in a fine.

  The Finnish media and publishing industries were ever alert to material that might displease the Soviets. ‘What I have heard from older colleagues is that foreign policy in particular was a touchy issue,’ foreign editor of Helsingin Sanomat, Heikki Aittokoski, told me. ‘The foreign ministry was extremely active pressurising our people. Basically everybody knew that our independence depended on Moscow. Books were removed from libraries if they were anti-Soviet, for instance. It was big news when Gorbachev came to Helsinki and declared Finland was a neutral country. Today you think, “So what? Wasn’t Finland already free?” But back then it was a big headline. He didn’t say you are an independent country, he said “neutral”, i.e. not a part of the Soviet Bloc – “You’re free to go, do what you want to do.”’ (What Aittokoski neglects to mention here is that in 1991, when Gorbachev was kidnapped and deposed, his paper published a leader suggesting that this was a positive turn of events; it was still clearly wary of incurring the displeasure of the Politburo.)

  All of this anxiety is entirely understandable. For much of the Cold War, Russian tanks were lined up along the Finnish border awaiting the order to roll. And who would come to the Finns’ aid if the Russians did invade? The neutral Swedes in their hairnets? The demilitarised Germans? Finland is an awfully long way from America. Instead, the Finns did what they were best at: they adapted to the prevailing realpolitik, swallowed their pride, put their heads down and got on with it. One imagines the taboos multiplied exponentially.

  One would also assume that all the military losses, divisive internal conflicts and the subjugation of national autonomy to the multiple exigencies of pragmatism must have taken a severe toll on Finnish self-esteem. And then the collapse of the Iron Curtain in 1989 left Finland virtually bankrupt. With the Soviet Union in pieces it had lost its major trading partner. Exports plummeted and the economy shrank by 13 per cent within months. The nineties must, I imagined, have been just another long decade of wound-licking and humiliation to add to the many they had experienced during the previous century.

  ‘Oh God, absolutely not. It’s a success story!’ said Roman Schatz when I put this to him. ‘There have never been so many Finns on the planet as there are now. I don’t see Finland’s history as being full of suffering or occupation. They have managed to attract everything they needed to build up their own nation and culture since Finland became independent in 1917.’

  They were the very definition of a pragmatic people. But what about the effect on their soul of the last hundred years? ‘They have to be pragmatic,’ Schatz argued. ‘They are used to –40ºC and they have bears! If you are used to dealing with 200,000 lakes, and winters that last for eight months, the Russians are nothing. I would call it a shrewdness, a survival instinct. For me Finlandisation [the name given to the self-censorship in matters sensitive to the Soviets] is a positive word, because that was the only way to deal with that situation.’

  ‘There was never the feeling of being a victim,’ agreed Kolbe. ‘We were never occupied, so that was our success.’

  I can’t help feeling, though, that there is little romance in pragmatism; it is hard to muster any great stirring pride in realpolitik, hard to get passionate about men who trade secrets in the smoke-filled rooms of the Kremlin, titbits about London in the summer houses of Hanko, or packages of smoked salmon and vodka during Christmas parties at the embassy. It is unsurprising then that, for many years, Finlandisation was yet another taboo to add to the great list of things not to bring up in conversation with Finns.

  And how does the Finnish media treat Russia today? President Putin recently threatened Finland with ‘retaliatory measures’ if it allowed a mooted deployment of NATO weapons, for instance. Do Finnish newspapers still maintain a respectful approach to the Russian leadership? ‘No. I would say we have no inhibitions about bashing the Russians,’ said Aittokoski. ‘We’re definitely no longer pro-Russian. There is always a latent threat if Putin’s system turns out to be that of an evil aggressive power – obviously then we aren’t that safe, because we are still close and deep down you can never feel comfortable because anybody who has read history knows you can never be entirely sure.’

  Chapter 6

  School

  FINLAND’S MOST LAUDED achievement of the Post Cold War era has been its education system, not that you would know it if it had been left to the Finns to broadcast the fact. Naturally, it took foreigners to point it out that Finland has the best schools in the world.

  Every three years since 2000, the OECD has published what is widely considered to be the definitive ranking list of international educational systems. It charts the performance of fifteen-year-olds in maths, reading and science in 70 countries, and on every occasion Finland has been at, or close, to the top of the list in each of the three fields. The Atlantic recently called Finland ‘the West’s reigning educational superpower’.

  For years, educationalists have been flocking to Finland from all over the world to discover its secrets. These are not immediately obvious. You might assume that the Finns are showering their schools with tax money faster than Nokia can earn it, but no: they spend no more than the OECD average on education per student; Finnish teachers are paid roughly in line with other Western European teachers, and actually around 20 per cent less than American teachers. You might also assume that Finnish schools have smaller class sizes, or that their children go straight from the womb to the classroom, or are sent home with stacks of homework as high as their hats, tested more often than pro cyclists, and that their Coco Pops are laced with a daily dose of Ritalin.

  No, no and no again (admittedly, I have no analysis of their breakfast cereals). Class sizes are not unusually small by Nordic standards, twenty to twenty-three children. As happens in the rest of the Nordic counties, Finnish kids do not commence their formal education until seven years of age. Because such a large proportion of women work, and childcare is so cheap (fees are related to parental income), most children are in day care from a very early age, but only at seven do they finally sit down in a classroom for any prolonged amount of time. There is little or no testing before sixteen; comparatively little homework; no public listing of schools’ performances; and children spend o
nly an average of four hours a day at school. There’s no hothousing here.

  So far, so Scandinavian, but Finland outperforms its Nordic neighbours, too. One Danish friend sniffed when I raved about the Finnish education system, pointing out that it is not so successful at university level. There is some truth to this, but over 95 per cent of Finnish children still go on to some kind of further education beyond the age of sixteen. The Swedes, too, are miffed that their former territory is outperforming them in such an important marker of modernity and civilisation; they claim Finland has certain unfair advantages, in particular its extreme homogeneity and comparative lack of immigration.

  It has to be said that even the Finns were a little perplexed at their domination of the first PISA ratings (the OECD Programme for Student Assessment). Initially they assumed it was a weird anomaly in PISA’s system, and even today there are those who remain sceptical.

  ‘The school system is good in the sense that everyone gets equal opportunities, but I don’t go along with all this stuff about the Finnish education system being the best in the world: I don’t believe these PISA studies,’ journalist Heikki Aittokoski told me. ‘The answer is simply that the Finnish school system is as good as other Western European ones, but we have a much smaller immigrant population and we don’t have many poor students. Also 99 per cent of students speak Finnish or Swedish as their mother tongue, but if you go to Germany, say, then you have 10 per cent who speak Turkish. That’s my theory anyway.’

  ‘To that I would say, not only do the non-immigrants [Finns] perform better than non-immigrant Swedes, but the Finnish immigrants do better than the Swedish immigrants,’ Professor Patrik Scheinin, Dean of the Faculty of Behavioural Sciences at the University of Helsinki (the department charged with fine-tuning the Finns’ human development and learning), told me as we sat in his office in the northern part of the city centre. ‘Everybody does better. The Swedes’ claims that PISA is explained by this don’t hold up. There are countries with more immigrants than Sweden with better education systems, and ones with smaller immigrant populations who are doing worse.’

  The most striking aspect of Finland’s performance, beyond its general, all-round excellence, is the fact that the success is spread evenly among all of its schools: it is the country with the least amount of performance variance between school: there is just 4 per cent difference in performance between the best of them, and the worst. Other high achievers – the tiger-mum countries like Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong – stream off the highest-achieving students into special hothouse schools; they boast low levels of variation within schools but, when you compare performance between schools, particularly in different parts of the country, the disparities are great. In Finland, however, it doesn’t matter if you go to school in a remote part of Lapland or a suburb of Helsinki, the chances are your child’s performance will remain constant.

  This might not seem that important, but in a recent survey by Gallup of internal migration, the Finns came third, behind New Zealand and the US, as the most likely people to move from one city to another over a period of five years. Scheinin thus believes this inter-school equality is crucial. ‘Out of every hundred there will be several kids who do change classes, and if you put that together over nine years of schooling, it does make up quite a percentage. If you end up having a big hole in your maths [as a result of moving schools], you are in serious trouble.’ The secret, he says, is a rigorously enforced, consistent curriculum, with children who fall behind given one-on-one tutoring (around a third of Finnish schoolkids get this extra help each year).

  Equally important are the care and resources lavished on those doing the teaching. ‘We have ridiculous numbers of teacher-training departments all over the place,’ as Scheinin put it. In Finland, teaching has been seen as a prestigious career since the earliest days of the country’s education system in the latter part of the nineteenth century, because teachers played a key role in the country’s emergence as an independent nation. It is almost impossible to conceive of such a scenario when I recall the ragbag of psychopaths and social misfits who guided my own education, but Finland is a country in which teachers have long been national heroes, at the forefront of defining and disseminating their country’s blossoming self-image. They were nothing less than the nation’s intellectual freedom fighters.

  ‘Back then it was about mind-building, identity-building, so they recruited teachers who would be pioneers, to carry the torch out into the country, so in that sense teaching has always had a certain glory to it ever since,’ said Scheinin. Early on, Finnish education was essentially the teaching of survival skills, everything from woodwork to sewing. Teachers became known as the ‘candles of the people’, lighting the path to Finnish self-reliance.

  Teaching remains an attractive career. Over a quarter of Finnish graduates see teaching as their top option. Unlike in the US or UK, where it is not unheard of for teacher-training applicants to be semi-literate, in Finland teaching attracts the brightest students.

  ‘Think back to your teachers,’ Scheinin suggests to me. I shudder. ‘Exactly!’ He laughs. ‘Now would that experience induce you to go into teaching? No. But if your experience is of someone who is a nice guy, working well, diligent, trying hard, skilled, you might feel differently.’

  In Finland, teacher-training courses can be more difficult to get on to than those in law or medicine. They are routinely oversubscribed by a factor of ten, sometimes much more. At the University of Helsinki a couple of years ago they had 2,400 applications for the 120 places on the master’s programme. Ever since 1970, all Finnish teachers have been required to study to master’s level with state support. ‘All Finnish teachers have a research-based approach to their training. They are not just taught how to teach, they are taught to think critically about what they do,’ says Scheinin.

  Despite the historically important, heroic role teachers played in Finland’s history, in truth, the country’s education system was just as bad as ours until the introduction of the master’s requirement for teachers. This was clearly a crucial element of their success.

  ‘Give your teachers a master’s-level education,’ said Scheinin when I asked him what advice he would give other countries. But that would cost a fortune, I say. ‘But can you afford not to spend the money? Either that or you have only those people coming to university whose parents are wealthy enough to pay for it – people who are less likely to choose teaching as a career and more likely to follow what their parents did. In Finland everyone can go to university. You want those smart working-class kids to be teachers. And, actually, the UK spends more but achieves less. The trick is to select the best possible students and fund them instead of using a hell of a lot of effort to train those who aren’t so good and don’t have the potential.’

  Another theory about why Finnish kids do so well, particularly in the earlier stages of their schooling, is the simplicity of their language. The American journalist Malcolm Gladwell famously speculated that Chinese children do well at maths because their number system is logical, clear, simple and monosyllabic compared with English and many other languages. Perhaps the same applies to Finnish. ‘Once a child learns to read and write at age six or so, that skill is done once and for all. Of course vocabulary increases, but new words just slot in,’ a Finnish friend told me when I put the theory to him. Does this simplicity give Finnish children a linguistic leg-up, I wonder? Doing away with the future tense must save a bit of time, for a start. Finland’s Swedish-speaking schools do perform closer to European averages: Swedish is a more complex language and presumably takes longer to master.

  There is one other, actually quite important reason why Finland does so well. That word again: equality. There is no two-tier, public–private education system in Finland. There are no private schools in Finland, at least not in the sense of private schools in the rest of the world. All schooling in Finland is state-funded. The message from Finland, then, is that equality starts at the blackboard.

/>   So, the teachers are happy, PISA is happy, the parents are happy, and Finland’s economy clearly benefits from having a labour force that can help it diversify away from selling stuff made out of trees. But what about the children? Are they happy?

  Just before I travelled to Finland, the World Health Organisation published research into how different pupils from around the world enjoy their schooling – or not. To the surprise of many, Finnish children enjoyed school the least of all the nationalities asked. Back in 2006, the OECD published a similar report which revealed that Swedish children had more fun in school than Finnish kids and, though Finnish children achieved higher test results, Swedish youngsters were better at expressing themselves.

  ‘If you look at [the question] actually asked it was, do you like school “a lot”, and few said yes,’ says Scheinin. ‘Our research shows they think school is “okay” and, frankly, if you ask someone pre-puberty or in the midst of puberty whether they like anything, the most you are going to get is, “It’s okay.” Add to that the melancholy attitude of the Finns to everything . . . What we also saw from the WHO report was that the Finnish kids were among the most positive when you asked them “Do you think school counts?” Of course, if you compare them to countries where the alternative to school is to be on the streets, those children will be more positive [about any schooling].’

  Many people pounced on the WHO report as evidence that the Finnish education system somehow fostered the social disengagement and resentment that had prompted two recent incidents in which Finnish students ran amok with guns at their schools. In November 2007, eighteen-year-old Pekka-Eric Auvinen shot his headmistress, the school nurse and seven students at his school in Jokela, thirty miles north of the capital. Then, in September 2008, Matti Juhani Saari, a twenty-two-year-old trainee chef at the Kauhajoki School of Hospitality 180 miles north-west of Helsinki, shot ten of his fellow students dead at a college with a .22 caliber pistol.