Finland’s new prime minister backs four-day working week

Sanna Marin is a supporter of reducing the working day, though it is not government policy

Finland’s new prime minister is a supporter of cutting the working week to four-day days, and has argued that the change would let people spend more time with their families.

Sanna Marin, a social democrat, who took office in December, leads a broad coalition that also includes greens, leftists and centrists.

“I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture,” she had previously said at her party's conference in the autumn of 2019.

“This could be the next step for us in working life.”

While the idea is not government policy under her coalition administration, her recent support for the radical move raises the prospect that Finland could eventually become the latest country to experiment with cutting working hours. 

Ms Marin, who is the world’s youngest serving national leader, also suggested that as an alternative the standard working day could be reduced to six hours, down from the current eight.

The working week in Europe was progressively shortened around the turn of the 20th century, largely under pressure from the labour movement – with the gradual introduction of the modern two-day weekend and the eight-hour day.

But change has been slower in recent decades, with the five-day week and eight-hour day becoming the standard benchmark across the developed world. 

An attempt by former French prime minister Lionel Jospin to bring in a 35-hour workweek at the beginning of the 21st century produced only limited success, with many loopholes and low uptake.

Ahead of last year’s general election, the UK’s Labour Party said it wanted to work towards a four-day week as a long-term aim within a decade, though the party remains in opposition.

Critics say reducing the working week while paying people the same amount would impose a cost on business, but proponents say the difference would be made up because of increased productivity.

Some local councils in Finland’s neighbour Sweden have been experimenting with six-hour days in recent years, with early results suggesting the move increased productivity. 

The political backdrop to the Finnish prime minister’s call is months of industrial unrest, which brought down the previous government. The strikes were brought to an end by a pay deal between unions and employers, which saw improvements in pay rises and working conditions. 

Finland has one of the highest levels of trade union coverage in Europe, with 91 per cent of employees covered by collective agreements guaranteeing working time, pay and conditions.

This figure compares with an EU average of 60 per cent. The corresponding coverage for the UK is 29 per cent of workers, one of the lowest in the bloc – while the highest are found in France, Belgium and Austria, where collective bargaining coverage is near-universal. 

(Source: Independent)

“She comes, they are happy”: How communal grandparents are helping raise Finnish children

It’s Wednesday morning, so toddlers in the Tammi nursery in Helsinki, Finland, are excited—their communal grandparent, or “kylämummi,” is here.

This classroom’s “kylämummi” is Marjatta Ahonen,  a 71-year old retired psychotherapist. She volunteers for the Mannerheim League for Child Welfare (MLL), Finland’s largest organization dedicated to child and family welfare. From 2006, MLL has run a program encouraging older people to volunteer as communal grandparents. They meet their communal “grandchildren” in schools, libraries, and other family-friendly spaces. The idea is to give lonely pensioners a purpose, and to give children who may live far away from their own grandparents a chance to forge a meaningful bond with an older person. There are 830 communal grandparents across Finland.

Communal grandmother Marjatta Ahonen reads a book to children at the Tammi nursery in Helsinki, Finland.

For Ahonen, it’s a source of joy to visit the Tammi nursery once a week, something she has done every week for the past eight years. She plays with the children, helps teachers manage lunch and nap time, and generally serves as a constant, loving presence for the 18 toddlers aged between two and five. A petite woman with curly blond hair and a reserved demeanor, Ahonen has a ready smile for anyone under three feet tall. She has two children of her own and no grandchildren, though you wouldn’t know it from watching her read a book to seven restless toddlers, all of whom are vying for the coveted spot on her lap. “It gives me a lot of joy to be here,” she says. “I feel that I’m needed and…I will continue to do it as long as I am able.”

“When she comes, the kids are like ‘wow,’” says Maileena Nieminen, the lead teacher at Tammi. “She comes, they are happy.”

Finland’s communal grandparent program is part of a growing movement whose goal is to forge meaningful relationships across generational divides. But there is little evidence  so far to show  that these programs are successfully recreating family-like relationships, or that they are feasible and scalable answers to two of the thorniest challenges that rich countries face today: Aging societies and loneliness.

Marjatta serves lunch with lead teacher Maileena Nieminen. Today, the kids got to choose their meal, and they wanted fish sticks.

In the name of progress, Western societies have segregated the generations. Where extended families once lived and worked together, economic expansion after the industrial revolution (paywall) and the modern-day welfare system now keeps them apart. Children move to big cities in search of jobs and opportunity, leaving parents and grandparents behind—or in nursing homes. A recent survey of 2,000 adults in the US conducted by the online genealogy company Ancestry.com showed that a third of Americans can’t even name all of their grandparents. “I think it’s a terrible loss in our culture,” says Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in child development.

Research shows that young and old people need each other to thrive. “The needs and the assets of the generations fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” explains Marc Freedman, CEO and founder of Encore, a nonprofit that matches retiring adults with companies in need of talent. “The old, as they move into the latter phases of life, are driven by a deep desire to be needed by the next generation and to nurture it; the young have a need to be nurtured,” he wrote in The Wall Street Journal (paywall).

Urie Bronfenbrenner, co-founder of the Head Start program in the US, which provides early childhood education, health, nutrition services to poor children under age five and their families, reportedly had a simple way of putting it: “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”

“Biology flows downhill”
In the 1950s, a team of mental health workers, pediatricians, public health nurses, and social workers in Hawaii followed a group of 698 children from birth through age 40, in an attempt to understand what makes some children resilient in the face of adversity and others not. The Kauai Longitudinal Study (pdf) found that “children who succeeded against the odds had the opportunity to establish, early on, a close bond with at least one competent, emotionally stable person who was sensitive to their needs.” More often than not, this person was a grandparent, older sibling, aunt, or uncle.

Marjatta reads the kids a book before their nap time. But these children are too excited to sleep, having fought a bitter battle to decide who would get to sit on her lap.

Evolutionary theory posits that grandparents pass human culture onto the next generation. Communal grandmother Marjatta Ahonen was born in 1948 in Ylistaro, in the Finnish countryside. Kids at the Tammi nursery in Helsinki are often curious about her childhood. They ask her what Christmas was like when she was growing up, and she tells them about how her family used to melt the ice off the Christmas trees they chopped down in the forest. She also tells them how as a kid, she used to go through the garden with her friends, looking for eggs that their chickens had laid the day before.

Sure, they could read about all of this in a book; but it’s not the same as hearing it from someone who lived it. “I share my life experience and help with those stories,” says Ahonen.

According to research by anthropologist Kristen Hawkes of the University of Utah, the human race survived this long because grandmothers were around to feed and care for children, thus freeing up their daughters to have more babies, and pass on their “longevity-promoting genes,” as Lindsay Abrams put it in The Atlantic. The “grandmother hypothesis” helps explain why women survive past menopause, when they can no longer help perpetuate the species: Their grandchildren need them during their first few years of life, a period that is crucial to their development.

“If young people need adults who are irrationally crazy about them, as older people, we need to be irrationally crazy about the next generation.”
When children are very young, they need continuous back-and-forth interactions with loving adults around them to thrive. What some scientists call an “environment of relationships” helps kids develop the skills they need to be confident and happy, to do well in school, to get along with others and resolve conflicts, and to learn the difference between right and wrong.

While grandparents are good for kids, it’s also true that kids are good for grandparents. In the 1930s, the Harvard Study of Adult Development showed that the quality of people’s relationships can determine their physical and mental health. George Vaillant, one of the leaders of the study, wrote in his book, Aging well, that adults who invest in nurturing the next generation are more likely to be happy than those who do not. “Biology flows downhill,” Vaillant wrote.

Freedman, of Encore, the nonprofit that matches retirees with companies, says that intergenerational connections are key. “If young people need adults who are irrationally crazy about them, as older people, we need to be irrationally crazy about the next generation. It’s a central part of the human makeup, and one that we have, in many ways, abandoned in the modern world.”

“Clearing the market for love”
There’s no exact formula for the communal grandparent program, and that’s what makes it special: MLL knows that you can’t teach or fake love. Volunteers undergo a one-time, three-to-four hour training session. It introduces them to MLL’s values and principles, helps them plan out activities to do with the children, and explains why intergenerational relationships are important and why play matters to children’s development.

“Marjatta is here only for the children.”
Volunteers spend a set amount of time, usually a morning or an afternoon, with children every week, playing with them, reading to them, or doing activities with them, such as baking cookies or walking in the snow. At Tammi, Marjatta Ahonen accompanies the kids to an indoor gymnasium every second Wednesday. While the older kids play on gym mats, she keeps the younger and shyer ones company. “Everyone likes her, but maybe the little ones are more with her, because they need more help,” says the teacher Maileena Nieminen. “She knows—she sees who needs her.”

Unlike teachers and assistants, communal grandparents have time and undivided attention to give, which is exactly what curious toddlers need. They want nothing more than to ask how the bird they just saw hit a window got back up and flew away. They want to read the same book for the dozenth time and ask why the story ended the way it did. “She can sit down and be there and read the book from the beginning to the end,” says Nieminen about Ahonen. “I don’t like to stop something that I’m doing with the children, but we need to do it. Marjatta is here only for the children.”

“This program felt like it was clearing the market for love,” says Freedman. “At one level, this contact is developmentally stimulating: Hearing words and stories and music from adults is so important for the healthy development of young children. But I think at a deeper level, these children pick up a more secure sense of attachment and grow up feeling loved by being around a portfolio of adults who are investing in them, who are caring about them, who are being irrationally crazy about them.”

“All of us need at least one person to play that role, as Bronfenbrenner suggests, but I think we’re better off if we have a multitude.”

The evidence
There are no large-scale studies measuring the effect of communal grandparents. But assessments of other, similar programs that regularly bring old and young people together (pdf) have consistently shown benefits for the volunteers and the children. The older people feel a sense of purpose and don’t have to spend as much time alone; and the kids have one more adult around them who is invested in their success.

“I hope that he sees every day that he’s truly helping and making a difference.”
One of the things that sets us apart from our closest primate relatives is that the care of young children isn’t just left to family members; it’s also done by neighbors, friends, and even volunteers like the communal grandparents. These “alloparents,” a term popularized by anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy in her book Mother Nature, may have been crucial to the survival of the human race, and they’ve been proven to improve children’s health, socio-emotional, and behavioral outcomes.

Emma Herlin, a kindergarten teacher in Finland who studied communal grandparents for her PhD, says that whether this intergenerational program benefits kids and grandparents alike depends on the participants’ willingness to engage. She observed a communal grandfather, whom she called “tapsa-vaari,” or grandpa tapsa, in a daycare in southern Finland and interviewed seven of the children in his group, all between four and five years old. Herlin asked the children to draw pictures of grandpa tapsa and then reconstructed meaning from the drawings using a narrative method.

His visits, Herlin noticed, meant different things to different children. For some, they were an unremarkable part of the weekly schedule. For others, they were exciting and an opportunity to spend some time with a supportive adult. “It’s about the individuals,” she says. “So, a different place or a different volunteer, it might have a completely different story.”

Overall though, she said the communal grandfather was “truly helping and making a difference.”

Communal grandmother Marjukka Hartikainen draws with a group of children at the International Family Café in Espoo.

Research shows that intergenerational programs are successful when they foster secure, respectful, equitable, and reciprocal relationships between the participants, and when they approach “learning” as a long-term process, not just a weekly benchmark. That means kids will learn best if their communal grandparent plays a game or reads a book with them, and does activities that are culturally relevant.

Recreating the village
Nearly a third of the 18 children who attend Tammi nursery live too far away from their grandparents to see them often. For them, Marjatta Ahonen may be the only older adult with whom they have a relationship. And for Ahonen, her time at the nursery may be the only regular time she spends with young children. They are not as close as family, she admits, “but very close. And it’s wonderful.”

Loneliness for older people is an increasingly common problem in Finland, partly because people now live much longer than before. The proportion of Finland’s population made up of people over the age of 65 will grow from 22.7% today to 27.2% by 2040. By 2070, it’s projected to be 33.1%. Older people are especially likely to report feeling lonely (a subjective feeling) or socially isolated (an objective metric). In Europe, more than 75 million adults (pdf) meet with family or friends once a month at most, and about 30 million adults report frequently feeling lonely.

“The old ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ that’s not just a political slogan, that’s what all the science tells you.”
Chronic loneliness and social isolation can be deadly: It increases adults’ risk of heart attack and stroke, depression, dementia, and premature mortality. But old people aren’t the only ones who report often feeling lonely. Surveys point to the fact that, in many rich countries, the two loneliest groups are the young and the old.

“Our institutions are very age-segregated,” says Gopnik of the University of California, and this can harm children too. “The old ‘it takes a village to raise a child,’ that’s not just a political slogan, that’s what all the science tells you.” To raise a happy, healthy, and thriving human child, there needs to be a multitude of people around (paywall) to invest time and resources in their well-being. That sense of communal investment in child-rearing has “fallen by the wayside” in a post-Industrial world, she says, ceding way to “the default assumption that…the way caregiving should be done is one mother, sitting in a house in the suburbs somewhere, taking care of one or two children. And that’s not a good model for caregiving.”

There are hundreds of programs around the world bringing the young and the old together in the hopes that it may cure at least a little of what ails them both. Singapore is building eldercare and childcare facilities in the same spaces to “provide opportunities for intergenerational bonding.” The European Union runs a multi-country program called Together Old and Young (TOY), which promotes intergenerational learning. Last year, British prime minister Theresa May appointed a minister for loneliness, with a focus on creating opportunities to bring people of all ages together so that “nobody should feel alone or be left with no one to turn to.”

In the US in the 1960s, Robert Sargent Shriver, Jr., a reformer, presidential candidate, and brother-in-law to John F. Kennedy, created the Foster Grandparent program. It was meant to match older volunteers with children in need in their communities. Before Shriver died in 2011, Freedman of Encore was able to ask him if he thought the program worked. The answer was encouraging. “He said he was convinced that it did, and it worked for two reasons: It was simple, it was one-on-one, and it was human. It was all about relationships.”

“That is really, in a way, the essence of these efforts,” says Freedman. “They’re simple, they’re human, and they’re reproducing a fundamental part of the human experience, which is the grandparent-grandchild relationship.”

These programs may appear to be simple, but recreating something as fundamentally complex as the grandparent-grandchild relationship is hard. That’s one of the pitfalls of Finland’s communal grandparent programs, and any other program like it. It’s easy to just drop an elderly person into a kid-friendly space and leave it at that. But you’re not going to recreate “family-like” relationships by “just sort of parachuting in,” says Gopnik. For that, you need time, consistency, and effort.

“I’m convinced that the grandparent-grandchild relationship is one of the most important bonds in society and human history,” says Freedman, “and it can be reproduced in people who are not blood relatives in the traditional sense.”

The scene at the International Family Café in Espoo, a sprawling city that is part of greater Helsinki, shows just how difficult this can be. The family café is another program run by MLL to bring together new parents. A communal grandmother, Marjukka Hartikainen, volunteers there, but she mostly stays quiet, interacting with the seven energetic kids in the room once in a while to bring them a pen and paper to draw with, or to pick up a baby that has crawled too far away. The kids get bored quickly, and there is very little apparent depth to the exchange. It doesn’t help that different kids and parents come to the café every week, making it difficult to create lasting relationships.

“The only true cure for social isolation is a real relationship,” says Freedman. “Just having contact, as opposed to connexion, is probably not that valuable, significant, or enduring.”

Not a silver bullet
Finland is committed to reducing social isolation and loneliness among vulnerable populations. The municipality provides the space for many of MLL’s initiatives, from the family cafes to peer support groups, and through the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, develops and commissions research on social welfare programs. But there is still some way to go. “I wish we had more contacts with grandparents generally, more visits in the grandparents’ homes, or with lonely people who are old,” says Maileena Nieminen, the lead teacher at Tammi.

About a month ago, Finns celebrated National Grandparents’ Day. Nieminen invited all of the children’s grandparents to come to the nursery for coffee and a singalong. Then, she took them to visit her father, who lives close by and is often lonely. Until a few years ago, these kinds of visits were a more regular occurrence. One morning every month, Nieminen would take the kids to  a retirement home next to the nursery to sing and play with people there. Then the retirement home closed down.

One of MLL’s biggest challenges is finding enough funding and volunteers to keep these types of programs going. Last year, it shut down a two-year initiative called “terhokerho,” which had older and younger people meeting and playing games together. Most of MLL’s yearly budget of €9 million ($9.9 million) is allocated by a government agency through the national lottery fund, or “veikkaus.” But there isn’t enough money to expand nationwide.

The communal grandparent experiment shows that it is possible to reimagine relationships between the old and the young, in a society that will soon have more over-65s than under-14s.  And in the meantime, hundreds of communal grandparents continue their labor of love across Finland.

(Source: Quartz)

Nordic nations have ‘disturbingly high’ levels of rape despite being gender equality trailblazers

'Social stigma and a lack of trust in the justice system often mean that women and girls fail to report attacks,' says Amnesty International’s Secretary General

Nordic nations have “disturbingly high” levels of rape despite being gender equality trailblazers, according to a new report which also suggested they were failing victims.

Flawed legislation, prevalent harmful myths and gender stereotypes have given rise to endemic impunity for rapists across the region, Amnesty International found.

Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden – four countries which are among the top-ranking countries in the world for gender equality – were all found to have high levels of rape and survivors of sexual violence are being let down by their justice systems.

In Finland, around 50,000 women each year experience sexual violence but there were only 209 convictions for rape in 2017. In the same year, 24,000 women were victims of rape or attempted rape in Denmark, but only 94 people were convicted. 

Despite changes in law in Sweden, one in 10 people believe gender-based violence against women is provoked by the victim herself, the report found.

Kumi Naidoo, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said: “It is a paradox that Nordic countries, which have strong records of upholding gender equality, suffer shockingly high levels of rape."

Social stigma and a lack of trust in the justice system often mean that women and girls fail to report attacks, and those that do, are frequently failed by callous and prejudiced justice systems or outdated laws, she said.

“One survivor told us she would never have reported her rape if she had known how she would have been be treated, and her story is typical in justice systems which are stacked against rape survivors," she added.

Ms Naidoo said that amending rape laws across the Nordic countries was a critical step towards changing attitudes and achieving justice, but much more was needed to effect institutional and social change.

She called on authorities to take steps to challenge rape myths and gender stereotypes at all levels of society. Professionals working with rape survivors need to get adequate ongoing training, she said, adding that broader sex education and awareness-raising programmes were needed from a young age.

Amnesty International noted that although the situation facing survivors of rape is not uniform across the four Nordic countries, there were “disturbing parallels” among them as their criminal justice systems “ignore, deny and tacitly condone” sexual violence against women.

The report entitled Time for change: Justice for rape survivors in the Nordic countries, found gender stereotypes and rape myths underpin attitudes of many people in the justice system in Norway.

One regional public prosecutor told the authors: “I have had a lot of student cases – decent young men who have done something stupid. It is not easy to convict a student who has come to this city to get a good education and who behaves well in court. He was drunk and horny and has done something stupid.”

They also pointed to to a “disturbing” district court judgment in Finland they analysed where a judge acquitted the defendants in a case of multiple perpetrators.

They said: “The fact that a sexual partner says ‘no, I don’t want to’ before sexual intercourse or between intercourses, is not always a sufficient signal to the other person that consent and willingness to continue sex is not present.”

(Source: Independent)

The borrowers: Why Finland's cities are havens for library lovers

Helsinki’s state-of-the-art Oodi library will stand opposite parliament and boast a cinema, recording studio and makerspace. It’s a perfect fit for a literate nation taking public learning to the next level, writes Tash Reith-Banks in the Guardian. Read on: 

“A library card was the first thing that was mine, that I had ever owned,” says Nasima Razmyar. The daughter of a former Afghan diplomat, Razmyar arrived in Finland with her family in 1992 as a refugee fleeing political unrest. Unable to speak the language, with scant resources, and trying to make sense of the strange new city she found herself in, she was stunned to discover she was entitled to a library card that would grant her books – for free. Her appreciation of the privilege has not faded: “I still have that library card in my wallet today,” she says proudly.

Today, Razmyar is deputy mayor of Helsinki, and ready to champion the institution that has given her so much – starting with the construction of Oodi, the city’s new central library, due to open in December. She is not alone in her passion for libraries. “Finland is a country of readers,” declared the country’s UK ambassador Päivi Luostarinen recently, and it’s hard to argue with her. In 2016 the UN named Finland the world’s most literate nation, and Finns are among the world’s most enthusiastic users of public libraries – the country’s 5.5m million people borrow close to 68m books a year.

Revolutionising the library … artist’s impressions of the design for Oodi

In recognition of that fact, at a time when libraries worldwide are facing budget cuts, a decline in users and closure, Finland is bucking the trend. According to local authority figures from 2016, the UK spends just £14.40 per head on libraries. By contrast, Finland spends £50.50 per inhabitant. While more than 478 libraries have closed in cities and towns across England, Wales and Scotland since 2010, Helsinki is spending €98m creating an enormous new one. Not content with merely building a library, the Finns have gone public with their passion: Mind-building, the Finnish pavilion at this year’s Venice architecture biennale, is a love letter to the nation’s literary landmarks.

Helsinki’s Rikhardinkatu Library opened in 1882 and was the first building in the Nordic countries to be built as a library. This picture shows the reading room in 1924. Photograph: Eric Sundström © Helsinki City Museum

It’s also not hard to see why Finland’s city libraries are so heavily used: 84% of the country’s population is urban, and given the often harsh climate, libraries are not simply places to study, read or borrow books – they are vital places for socialising. In fact, Antti Nousjoki, one of Oodi’s architects, has described the new library as “an indoor town square” – a far cry from the stereotypical view of libraries as stale and silent spaces. “[Oodi] has been designed to give citizens and visitors a free space to actively do what they want to do – not just be a consumer or a flâneur,” explains Nousjoki.

 Lohja main library, which was completed in 2005

Oodi – Ode in English – is more than a sober monument to civic pride. Commissioned as part of Finland’s celebration of a century of independence, the library is no mere book repository. “I think Finland could not have given a better gift to the people. It symbolises the significance of learning and education, which have been fundamental factors for Finland’s development and success,” says Razmyar.

Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed the Viipuri Library in 1927; this picture is from 1935. Border changes during the second world war mean it is now located in Vyborg, Russia.

Libraries are seen as the visible face of the Finnish belief in education, equality and good citizenship. “There’s strong belief in education for all,” says Hanna Harris, director of Archinfo Finland and Mind-building’s commissioner. “There is an appreciation of active citizenship – the idea that it is something that everyone is entitled to. Libraries embody that strongly,” she adds.

Kallio Library was opened in 1912 in the rapidly growing working-class district of Helsinki.
Preliminary floor plan by Karl Hård af Segerstad, Helsinki City Architect, in 1909.

Those feelings of pride in the equality of opportunity offered by the city’s new library are echoed by the site chosen for Oodi: directly opposite parliament. “I think there is no other actor that could stand in front of the grounds of democracy like the public library does,” says Razmyar. “It’s remarkable that when standing on the open balcony of the library people are looking straight into the parliament and standing on the same level.”

But Oodi isn’t the only Helsinki library to cause excitement. “Töölö library is one of my favourites,” says Harris. “It’s set in a park and has a rooftop balcony. Recently my colleagues and I went down there and there was a queue outside the doors – on a regular weekday morning, there was a queue at 9am to get in.”

Maunula House, which contains the local library, adult education centre and youth centre – and a door to the supermarket next door

Perhaps a clue to the Finnish enthusiasm for libraries comes from the fact that they offer far more than books. While many libraries worldwide provide internet access and other services, libraries in cities and towns across Finland have expanded their brief to include lending e-publications, sports equipment, power tools and other “items of occasional use”. One library in Vantaa even offers karaoke.

These spaces are not designed to be dusty temples to literacy. They are vibrant, well-thought-out spaces actively trying to engage the urban communities who use them. The library in Maunula, a northern Helsinki suburb, has a doorway that leads directly to a supermarket – a striking and functional decision which, along with its adult education centre and youth services section, was partly down to the fact that it was designed with input from locals.

Local favourite … Töölö library, Helsinki, in 1970

Oodi, however, will go even further: in addition to its core function as a library, it will boast a cafe, restaurant, public balcony, cinema, audiovisual recording studios and a makerspace with 3D printers. A sauna was apparently considered but seems not to have made the final cut.

This diversity is key, argues Razmyar. “Libraries must reach out to the new generations. The world is changing – so libraries are changing too. People need places to meet, to work, to develop their digital skills.”

Tampere’s Main Library, Metso, opened in 1986. Its shape was influenced by Celtic ornaments, sheep horns and glacial spin formations.

Moreover, as key urban buildings, libraries are designed to inspire ownership. “We want people to find and use the spaces and start to change them,” says Nousjoki. “Our aim was to make [Oodi] attractive so that everybody will use it – and play a role in making sure it is maintained.”

The site and design of Helsinki’s new library are certainly striking, but perhaps the most impressive thing about it is the lack of public opposition to such a costly project. “People are looking forward to Oodi. It’s not been contentious: people are excited about it across the board,” says Archinfo director Harris. “It will be important to daily life here in Helsinki.”

Finland: The only country where fathers spend more time with kids than mothers

From paid paternity leave to universal daycare, Finland is closing the gender gap, writes Alexandra Topping in the Guardian. Read on: 

To Americans and Britons, the Nordic countries have come to represent a near-mythical paradise of gender equality and family harmony, where legions of happy fathers push prams through the streets, relaxed mothers enjoy lengthy paid maternity leaves, and well-nourished children in chunky sweaters glow from their free healthcare.

But even against that backdrop, one statistic about Finland, a nation of 5.5 million, stands out: according to a recent OECD report, it’s the only country in the developed world where fathers spend more time with school-aged children than mothers, to the tune of eight minutes a day.

The Global Gender Gap report rated Finland the second most equal country in the world in 2016, and the Economist recently rated it the third best country to be a working mom.

A dad cheers his daughter on the sports field in Helsinki, Finland. ‘This is not about the mother’s right or the father’s right – but the child’s right to spend time with both parents.’ Photograph: Jussi Eskola

How did Finland get there? And what can the rest of us learn from this small Nordic nation that might accelerate the battle for gender equity in other places? It’s a story of collective action and political will, of a strong tradition of social democracy and an accommodating tax system. But it also boils down to a key difference in how Finland frames the conversation: it’s not about what’s good for adults – it’s about what’s good for children.

“This is a question of gender equality, but it’s more a question of the rights of the child,” says Annika Saarikko, Finland’s minister of family affairs and social services, one of six female ministers out of a cabinet of eleven. “This is not about the mother’s right or the father’s right – but the child’s right to spend time with both parents.”

Finland believes fathers play a crucial role in child development. The government offers fathers nine weeks of paternity leave, during which they are paid 70% of their salary. And to encourage fathers to take advantage of the benefit, it recently launched a new campaign – with flyers showing a burly construction worker joyfully pushing a pram – called “It’s Daddy Time!”

“We want fathers to take more of the shared parental leave available,” says Saarikko. “We are quite sure if we look at the research that the connection between the baby and the father is really important – the early years are vital and we believe in investing in that.”

 Annika Saarikko, Finland’s minister of family affairs and social services: ‘The early years are vital.’
Photograph: Jussi Eskola

While she advocates for fathers, Saarikko is also a fitting example of how mothers in Finland are to a degree liberated from the constraints of motherhood by the country’s supportive policies. She is 33 and has a three-year-old child in full-time public daycare. Her husband also works full-time. “You can be a young woman and a minister here,” she says. “My situation is not abnormal. In Finland it is normal to combine work and family – it’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.”

Finland’s current standing reflects a long legacy of women’s advancement. The country was the second in the world to give women the right to vote, and the first – in 1906 – to give them full political rights. Today, 42% of parliamentarians are women, whereas in the US, women hold just 19.6% of seats in Congress. “Finland was a poor country where women worked alongside men, and we all had to work together after the war to pay off our debt to the Russians,” says Paulina Ahokas, director of Tampere Hall, the largest concert and convention center in the Nordic countries. “But women have also been involved in decision-making for a long time – we believe that [leads to] the best decisions.”

Social support from the start
The Finnish state strives to provide both mothers and fathers with meaningful social support before their child is even born – and perhaps not coincidentally, the parents the Guardian spoke with in Finland seemed significantly less stressed than their counterparts on the other side of the Atlantic.

When parents have a child in Finland, they don’t have to worry about a huge medical bill. A pregnant woman with no complications can expect to be seen between 11 to 15 times before giving birth for free, and the cost of having a baby is nominal. Meanwhile, in the US, a delivery alone costs an average $10,000, while a caesarean delivery costs over $15,000, according to the International Federation of Health Plans (IFHP).

On top of that, for the past 80 years, the Finnish state has also gifted parents with a “baby box”, filled with newborn essentials including a sleeping bag, mattress, outdoor gear, toiletries and playsuits – all in gender neutral colors, of course. While families can opt to receive €140 instead, 95% of first-timers take the goodies, as they are worth much more.

The baby box has been credited with helping Finland achieve one of the lowest infant mortality rates in the world – it saw only 1.7 deaths per 1,000 live births in 2015, compared with the states’ strikingly high rate of 5.82 – not because of the bed itself, but because pregnant women must have a checkup before the end of their fourth month of pregnancy to receive it. “It’s the contact that’s important, not the box,” says Anita Haataja, who works for the Finnish social agency Kela.

 Inside the Aleksi daycare centre in Helsinki, Finland. Photograph: Jussi Eskola

Once the baby is born, Finland gives mothers about four months of paid maternity leave and fathers a little more than two months of paid leave. On top of all that, couples can share an additional five-plus months of paid parental leave between them. While most dads take the first three weeks of leave offered to them, only about half take the full two months and only a small percentage beyond that – numbers the “Daddy Time” campaign is hoping to boost.

Even after the parental leave period ends, one parent has the right to stay home, and get “paid” €450 a month, and return to the same job until the child is three years old. (Granted, some critics argue this stipend encourages women to stay away from the workplace for too long, thus harming their job prospects).

For Sami Sulin, who works in the back office of a bank, the benefit offered a welcome opportunity to spend time with his daughter. He stayed at home for a full 10 months from the time she was 10 months old, and he says an increasing number of his friends are doing the same. “No one was negative about it,” reports the 35-year-old. “I think it is just more socially acceptable now. There is a recognition that fathers need to participate in family life.”

‘It just feels natural and good to share the load’
Most parents, including mothers, do eventually go back to work – and when they do, the state provides universal daycare. At its most expensive, the service costs only €290 a month. For comparison, in the US, full-time childcare costs 85% of a family’s median rent in some places – and can be more expensive than sending your child to college. In London, the average is around £650 a month. Oh, and in Finland, someone else will take care of all the details.

“I guess the big difference is it is not stressful at all,” says sales manager Tuomas Aspiala, 40. “Someone else organizes everything.” When a local nursery didn’t have any space available for his two children, the city of Helsinki organised a nanny share to look after them until room became available. “The situation at the daycare centre is really fantastic. It’s really close, the people who look after the children are wonderful,” he says. “We really don’t feel guilty about leaving them there at all.”

The Aleksi daycare centre in Helsinki. Photograph: Jussi Eskola

Indeed, Finland’s early years care is arguably the best in the world, credited with helping the country land consistently high in the Pisa education rankings when children go to elementary school at the age of seven. “Here in Finland, schooling isn’t something people stress about at all,” says Noora Ahmed-Moshe, 37, who had her second daughter in Finland two months ago, after having her first while living in London.

Finnish companies’ attitudes tend to be progressive, too. Here, most people start the day around 8am and commonly wrap up between 4.pm and 5.pm. All of which adds up to a culture where parents are better able to divvy up the work of parenting.

For Petri and Kirsi Louhelainen, a tech startup entrepreneur and the CTO of a tech firm respectively, they both see the division of time and labor in the home as important for their sons.

“When I am at home, I’m really involved – that’s normal,” says Petri, 41. “Dads participate in their kids’ life and kids have a lot of hobbies, in my experience it’s often the dad who takes them.”

While Kirsi, 38, can’t personally attest to the finding that Finnish dads spend more time with school-age kids than moms – and it’s true that women here still spend around 71 more minutes a day than men with preschoolers – she appreciates how relatively egalitarian her country is compared with others in the western world. “Petri takes care of all the kids’ clothes. I find it too stressful,” she says. “But I cook more. It just feels natural and good to share the load.”

‘Finns have a pretty deep-rooted idea of social democracy’
None of this comes cheap, of course. Taxes account for 44% of Finland’s GDP, compared with about 25% in the US. Income tax includes payments to the town or city, the state, a church tax, and a public broadcasting tax. Someone earning $1.2m a year would pay as much as 51.5% to the state.

“Americans will say we pay a lot of tax, and it’s true, we do. I pay a lot, but I don’t lose any sleep over it,” says Aspiala, the sales manager. “Of course I would like to pay less tax, I would like the public sector to be less heavy – but I’m comfortable with it. I know that I am a net giver rather than net receiver, but if my tax goes to help someone worse off, then OK. Finns have a pretty deep-rooted idea of social democracy.”

 Like many families in Finland, Petri and Kirsi Louhelainen balance raising their two children. Photograph: Jussi Eskola

So does Finland agree with the American perception that it’s a utopian paradise? Not yet. Minister Saarikko acknowledges that deeply ingrained gender-related problems remain, particularly in remote areas. The gender pay gap still hovers at 16% to 18%, depending on which measure is used, which is not dissimilar to the 17% to 20% in the US. Most professions are still dominated by one gender. And women make up only 23% of board members in listed companies.

“One of the main barriers we face is the illusion of gender equality,” she says. “Many people think that gender equality has already been achieved in Finland.”

But the government is actively working to improve these figures. This year, the Finnish government launched an International Gender Equality Prize as part of celebrations marking 100 years of independence – it will give €150,000 to a person or organization “that has advanced gender equality in a globally significant way” to donate to the cause of its choice.

“I don’t know of any other country [that] would make this kind of prize it’s major statement in a celebratory year, and that makes me proud,” says Ahokas, the convention center director who is also the chair of the prize.

So where does the country go from here? The next big push for greater gender balance may just come from fathers, predicts Katja Lahti, 43, who writes a popular family blog Project Mama. “It feels like a real millennial movement of fathers who are asking for more, who want their voice,” she says. “It’s like they want to have it all.”

The bad American habits I kicked in Finland

From to-go mugs to small talk, writes Timothy D. Walker in the Atlantic. Read on: 

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

1. I don’t fear awkward silences.
I have yet to meet an American who doesn’t dread the awkward silence. A lull in any conversation is to be avoided at all costs—even if it means talking about the latest viral cat video or celebrity breakup.

The Finns I’ve met, on the other hand, embrace the awkward silence. They understand that it’s a part of the natural rhythm of human interaction. Sure, Finns know how to have conversations, but they’re not driven by a compulsion to fill time and space with needless chatter.

On a recent school day, as I dug into a lunch of fish sticks and steamed potatoes at the teachers’ table in the cafeteria, I was joined by a Finnish colleague. We exchanged hellos (since, you know, we hadn’t yet greeted each other that day), and then ate our meals in complete silence. We had been teaching all morning, and those fleeting moments of quiet were like a rest for our souls. After 10 minutes, I glanced up at the clock and, seeing that my next lesson was about to begin, broke the calm by saying goodbye. Even though we had just given each other “the silent treatment,” no harm was done. Quite the opposite, actually. I pushed in my chair feeling refreshed.

On the morning commute to my toddler’s daycare, the subway is often so packed that we can’t find a spot to sit. And yet it’s remarkably quiet. On the rare occasions when someone speaks—whether to bid farewell to a friend or make a quick phone call—my son Misaiel asks me, “Why they talkin’, Dada?” He is just two years old, but he already understands the culture of comfortable silence here.

2. I don’t say things I don’t mean.
Before we moved to Finland, my Finnish wife Johanna and I would visit Helsinki for two to three weeks at a time. I enjoyed these trips, but they were always jam-packed with get-togethers with friends and family. As a result, we could only realistically see a given friend or relative once while visiting Finland.

Even though I understood our time crunch, I couldn’t keep myself from saying “I would love to meet up again” at the end of each visit.

The Americans I know are in the habit of saying things like “Come on over anytime!” or “Keep in touch!” when we know it will be difficult to follow through on such sentiments. But to refrain from using these warm words would almost seem impolite. So, on one visit to Finland, I wielded this strategy—and it backfired, leading to the following exchange with my wife:

“Tim, I just spoke with my mom. Her friend is still waiting to hear back from us. Did you really say that you wanted to meet up again? You know we don’t have the time.”

“I never said I wanted to meet up,” I explained. “I just said ‘I’d love to meet up again.’ It’s like an expression.”

Johanna was not satisfied with that. “Tim,” she said, “you can’t speak like that here. In Finland, people take you at your word.”

Since that day, I’ve endeavored to say only what I mean.

3. I don’t leave food on my plate.
After returning to school from Christmas break this year, I found an official announcement on the whiteboard of my teachers’ lounge. Its message was straightforward: “No bio waste.”

In January, my school launched an initiative to combat leftover food, dubbed the “Eat What You Take” campaign. The methodology: remove the school’s compost bin. Now, when a student (or teacher) clears his tray and has food on his plate, there’s nowhere to ditch it. In the cafeteria, the only available receptacle for the 450 people in my school is a small container the size of a beach bucket, but it’s not for food. It’s only for dirty napkins.

Under this new policy, students who have food remaining on their plates have two options: take a seat and polish off the leftovers, or take a bold step into the kitchen and issue an apology to one of the lunch ladies.

I’ve never seen or heard of anything like this in the United States. But I have heard of American kids wasting a lot of school food. To take one example: In a study of Colorado elementary- and middle-school students conducted in 2010, those observed in elementary school, in the authors’ words, “wasted more than a third of grain, fruit and vegetable menu items.”

As for me, I learned my lesson last year when my sixth-graders caught me throwing away nearly half a plate of food. I had severely miscalculated, taking too much food without having enough time to stomach it all. Walking back to our classroom, I knew I’d need to make a slight change to my lesson plan. I’d start with a public apology.

4. I don’t take coffee to go.
Americans have a reputation for doing things on the go: breakfast in the car, lunch at a desk while catching up on email and, of course, coffee on the run. “America runs on Dunkin’,” right?

In Finland, my experience is that people are more likely to slow down when they drink coffee. They sit. They sip leisurely. I often catch them staring into space. It’s no surprise then that Finns consume nearly twice as much coffee as Americans.

And now I’ve become one of those coffee-drinking space cadets. But recently, I had an American relapse. I needed to rush out of the apartment, and I didn’t have time to sit down for a cup of coffee.

Finns consume nearly twice as much coffee as Americans, but they don't drink it on the go.
Frantically, I rummaged through the shelf that held our cups. Eventually, I found one silver to-go mug, but the cover was warped. And when I poured the coffee in, the bottom of the mug started to hiss and form tiny bubbles.

I shouted gruffly to my wife, “Why don’t we have one decent thermos in this house?”

Johanna snapped back, “Because we live in Europe. And Europeans don’t take coffee to go!”

5. I don’t feel uncomfortable in my own skin.
In the land of 3.3 million saunas, it is inevitable that you will eventually find yourself naked with people you don’t know—and not care in the slightest.

I didn’t realize that I had reached this level of Finnishness until this fall. A close friend from New York was visiting, and I insisted that on his last night in Finland he join me for a trip to one of the city’s public saunas. I was convinced that he would fall in love with this Finnish pastime, but I was wrong. Very wrong.

I explained that Finns go naked into saunas, but there are separate ones for men and women. The activity of taking a sauna is not, in any way, sexual. When we were in the changing room, I smiled and remarked to my friend, “This is where we leave the towels, man.” He was not amused. Clutching his towel around his waist, he growled, “No way.”

Unfazed, I hung up my own towel and strolled into the sauna Finnish-style. I found a spot on the top platform along with another naked man. A few moments later, my American buddy timidly opened the door and located a spot on the lowest bench, still gripping his towel as if his life (or manhood) depended on it.

He lasted about three minutes before declaring “enough” to me and the other naked strangers in the dimly lit room. I couldn’t help but laugh. I stayed seated—in silence, of course.

What Americans keep ignoring about Finland's school success

The Scandinavian country is an education superpower because it values equality more than excellence.

Everyone agrees the United States needs to improve its education system dramatically, but how? One of the hottest trends in education reform lately is looking at the stunning success of the West's reigning education superpower, Finland. Trouble is, when it comes to the lessons that Finnish schools have to offer, most of the discussion seems to be missing the point.

The small Nordic country of Finland used to be known -- if it was known for anything at all -- as the home of Nokia, the mobile phone giant. But lately Finland has been attracting attention on global surveys of quality of life -- Newsweek ranked it number one last year -- and Finland's national education system has been receiving particular praise, because in recent years Finnish students have been turning in some of the highest test scores in the world.

Finland's schools owe their newfound fame primarily to one study: the PISA survey, conducted every three years by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The survey compares 15-year-olds in different countries in reading, math, and science. Finland has ranked at or near the top in all three competencies on every survey since 2000, neck and neck with superachievers such as South Korea and Singapore. In the most recent survey in 2009 Finland slipped slightly, with students in Shanghai, China, taking the best scores, but the Finns are still near the very top. Throughout the same period, the PISA performance of the United States has been middling, at best.

Compared with the stereotype of the East Asian model -- long hours of exhaustive cramming and rote memorization -- Finland's success is especially intriguing because Finnish schools assign less homework and engage children in more creative play. All this has led to a continuous stream of foreign delegations making the pilgrimage to Finland to visit schools and talk with the nation's education experts, and constant coverage in the worldwide media marveling at the Finnish miracle.

So there was considerable interest in a recent visit to the U.S. by one of the leading Finnish authorities on education reform, Pasi Sahlberg, director of the Finnish Ministry of Education's Center for International Mobility and author of the new book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland? Earlier this month, Sahlberg stopped by the Dwight School in New York City to speak with educators and students, and his visit received national media attention and generated much discussion.


And yet it wasn't clear that Sahlberg's message was actually getting through. As Sahlberg put it to me later, there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.

* * *

During the afternoon that Sahlberg spent at the Dwight School, a photographer from the New York Times jockeyed for position with Dan Rather's TV crew as Sahlberg participated in a roundtable chat with students. The subsequent article in the Times about the event would focus on Finland as an "intriguing school-reform model."

Yet one of the most significant things Sahlberg said passed practically unnoticed. "Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."

This notion may seem difficult for an American to digest, but it's true. Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.

The irony of Sahlberg's making this comment during a talk at the Dwight School seemed obvious. Like many of America's best schools, Dwight is a private institution that costs high-school students upward of $35,000 a year to attend -- not to mention that Dwight, in particular, is run for profit, an increasing trend in the U.S. Yet no one in the room commented on Sahlberg's statement. I found this surprising. Sahlberg himself did not.

Sahlberg knows what Americans like to talk about when it comes to education, because he's become their go-to guy in Finland. The son of two teachers, he grew up in a Finnish school. He taught mathematics and physics in a junior high school in Helsinki, worked his way through a variety of positions in the Finnish Ministry of Education, and spent years as an education expert at the OECD, the World Bank, and other international organizations.

Now, in addition to his other duties, Sahlberg hosts about a hundred visits a year by foreign educators, including many Americans, who want to know the secret of Finland's success. Sahlberg's new book is partly an attempt to help answer the questions he always gets asked.

From his point of view, Americans are consistently obsessed with certain questions: How can you keep track of students' performance if you don't test them constantly? How can you improve teaching if you have no accountability for bad teachers or merit pay for good teachers? How do you foster competition and engage the private sector? How do you provide school choice?

The answers Finland provides seem to run counter to just about everything America's school reformers are trying to do.

For starters, Finland has no standardized tests. The only exception is what's called the National Matriculation Exam, which everyone takes at the end of a voluntary upper-secondary school, roughly the equivalent of American high school.

Instead, the public school system's teachers are trained to assess children in classrooms using independent tests they create themselves. All children receive a report card at the end of each semester, but these reports are based on individualized grading by each teacher. Periodically, the Ministry of Education tracks national progress by testing a few sample groups across a range of different schools.

As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. "There's no word for accountability in Finnish," he later told an audience at the Teachers College of Columbia University. "Accountability is something that is left when responsibility has been subtracted."

For Sahlberg what matters is that in Finland all teachers and administrators are given prestige, decent pay, and a lot of responsibility. A master's degree is required to enter the profession, and teacher training programs are among the most selective professional schools in the country. If a teacher is bad, it is the principal's responsibility to notice and deal with it.

And while Americans love to talk about competition, Sahlberg points out that nothing makes Finns more uncomfortable. In his book Sahlberg quotes a line from Finnish writer named Samuli Paronen: "Real winners do not compete." It's hard to think of a more un-American idea, but when it comes to education, Finland's success shows that the Finnish attitude might have merits. There are no lists of best schools or teachers in Finland. The main driver of education policy is not competition between teachers and between schools, but cooperation.

Finally, in Finland, school choice is noticeably not a priority, nor is engaging the private sector at all. Which brings us back to the silence after Sahlberg's comment at the Dwight School that schools like Dwight don't exist in Finland.

"Here in America," Sahlberg said at the Teachers College, "parents can choose to take their kids to private schools. It's the same idea of a marketplace that applies to, say, shops. Schools are a shop and parents can buy what ever they want. In Finland parents can also choose. But the options are all the same."

Herein lay the real shocker. As Sahlberg continued, his core message emerged, whether or not anyone in his American audience heard it.

Decades ago, when the Finnish school system was badly in need of reform, the goal of the program that Finland instituted, resulting in so much success today, was never excellence. It was equity.


* * *

Since the 1980s, the main driver of Finnish education policy has been the idea that every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location. Education has been seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.

In the Finnish view, as Sahlberg describes it, this means that schools should be healthy, safe environments for children. This starts with the basics. Finland offers all pupils free school meals, easy access to health care, psychological counseling, and individualized student guidance.

In fact, since academic excellence wasn't a particular priority on the Finnish to-do list, when Finland's students scored so high on the first PISA survey in 2001, many Finns thought the results must be a mistake. But subsequent PISA tests confirmed that Finland -- unlike, say, very similar countries such as Norway -- was producing academic excellence through its particular policy focus on equity.

That this point is almost always ignored or brushed aside in the U.S. seems especially poignant at the moment, after the financial crisis and Occupy Wall Street movement have brought the problems of inequality in America into such sharp focus. The chasm between those who can afford $35,000 in tuition per child per year -- or even just the price of a house in a good public school district -- and the other "99 percent" is painfully plain to see.


* * *

Pasi Sahlberg goes out of his way to emphasize that his book Finnish Lessons is not meant as a how-to guide for fixing the education systems of other countries. All countries are different, and as many Americans point out, Finland is a small nation with a much more homogeneous population than the United States.

Yet Sahlberg doesn't think that questions of size or homogeneity should give Americans reason to dismiss the Finnish example. Finland is a relatively homogeneous country -- as of 2010, just 4.6 percent of Finnish residents had been born in another country, compared with 12.7 percent in the United States. But the number of foreign-born residents in Finland doubled during the decade leading up to 2010, and the country didn't lose its edge in education. Immigrants tended to concentrate in certain areas, causing some schools to become much more mixed than others, yet there has not been much change in the remarkable lack of variation between Finnish schools in the PISA surveys across the same period.

Samuel Abrams, a visiting scholar at Columbia University's Teachers College, has addressed the effects of size and homogeneity on a nation's education performance by comparing Finland with another Nordic country: Norway. Like Finland, Norway is small and not especially diverse overall, but unlike Finland it has taken an approach to education that is more American than Finnish. The result? Mediocre performance in the PISA survey. Educational policy, Abrams suggests, is probably more important to the success of a country's school system than the nation's size or ethnic makeup.

Indeed, Finland's population of 5.4 million can be compared to many an American state -- after all, most American education is managed at the state level. According to the Migration Policy Institute, a research organization in Washington, there were 18 states in the U.S. in 2010 with an identical or significantly smaller percentage of foreign-born residents than Finland.

What's more, despite their many differences, Finland and the U.S. have an educational goal in common. When Finnish policymakers decided to reform the country's education system in the 1970s, they did so because they realized that to be competitive, Finland couldn't rely on manufacturing or its scant natural resources and instead had to invest in a knowledge-based economy.

With America's manufacturing industries now in decline, the goal of educational policy in the U.S. -- as articulated by most everyone from President Obama on down -- is to preserve American competitiveness by doing the same thing. Finland's experience suggests that to win at that game, a country has to prepare not just some of its population well, but all of its population well, for the new economy. To possess some of the best schools in the world might still not be good enough if there are children being left behind.

Is that an impossible goal? Sahlberg says that while his book isn't meant to be a how-to manual, it is meant to be a "pamphlet of hope."

"When President Kennedy was making his appeal for advancing American science and technology by putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960's, many said it couldn't be done," Sahlberg said during his visit to New York. "But he had a dream. Just like Martin Luther King a few years later had a dream. Those dreams came true. Finland's dream was that we want to have a good public education for every child regardless of where they go to school or what kind of families they come from, and many even in Finland said it couldn't be done."

Clearly, many were wrong. It is possible to create equality. And perhaps even more important -- as a challenge to the American way of thinking about education reform -- Finland's experience shows that it is possible to achieve excellence by focusing not on competition, but on cooperation, and not on choice, but on equity.

The problem facing education in America isn't the ethnic diversity of the population but the economic inequality of society, and this is precisely the problem that Finnish education reform addressed. More equity at home might just be what America needs to be more competitive abroad.

(Source: The Atlantic)

Finland has a word for getting drunk in your underwear at home

We’re all felt the frustration of not being able to find a word to describe something.

But Finland has you covered – at least, it does if you have an urge to get drunk at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out.

The word is kalsarikännit, and it should be used whenever you’ve had a bad week, have an open bottle of gin and all your friends are busy.

Finland has also created two emojis to celebrate the word – so you don’t even need to type it out to your ex-boyfriend at 3am.

Simply send him the emoji of a person drinking alone and half-naked, and he’ll know how well you’re doing since the break-up.

The emojis are part of a collection of 56, all aiming to capture hard-to-explain Finnish emotions and words.

(Source: Indy100)