It´s shame. Shame to be looser or less succesful. Shame to be different.

Shame to express yourself without some kind of mutually accepted comparability. Everything must be ranked very strictly in Finland. You are really loved only when you have over-exceeded your parents hopes. Shame is same time very accepted self-disciplinary act as “determined attitude” and same time self-loathing shame as different individual under social pressure.

Succes is accepted kind of sublimation for the refusal to express feelings. You are weak Finn when you show your feelings.

We are same kind of shame culture as Japan. “World Helth Organization” has ranked Finland most violent country in Europe. Same time we are one of the less corrupted. There are huge paradoxes in Finland. Even suicide is kind of competition. It is final Finnish pride to hang himself in the way that your legs touches floor and man could stop the strangling anytime but accomplishing the suicide this way shows how purposeful and hard man you are. There is no other country having self hanging as most used suicide practice.

“Defiance”, “uho”, is counter reaction for shame, “häpeä”. Behind the shame and succes we have horrible national history of wide hunger deaths before Finland became independent country.

– “Self-control is very important in Finland,” said Dr. Liisa
Keltikangas-Jarvinen, a professor of psychology at the University of
Helsinki. “You cannot show anger; it means you can’t cope. If a person
is very temperamental and alive, expresses emotions like anger and
happiness, the person is seen as infantile.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/11/international/europe/11HELS.html?ex=1137214800&en=fecc540e16d29e6a&ei=5070

– ” In 2004, a theater director named Turo Herala made big news in Helsinki when he began offering anger-venting classes – a true novelty in Finland. “Anger in Finland is a bigger taboo than sex,” Herala explained to a reporter.”

http://psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20070116-000004.html

Me: It’s usually considered a good thing, credibility wise, to have some sort of an idea about the things one is claiming to be an expert on.

Certain Finnish firms are in a situation in which they pretty much employ anybody with basic skills in manufacturing or construction. Some of them have started to hire straight from Chinese schools. The overall costs to get them here are pretty high, but the need is overwhelming. Hopefully that will get the ball rolling so that when Finland by 2025 needs about half a million “extra workers” the Chinese can fill a big part of the demand.

A China town in Helsinki by 2025 with 30 000 inhabitants, I hope.

My intro wasn’t directed toward learning abilities or schooling. It’s more about society, in general. Nothing I have written so far, has criticized the school system or learning abilities in Finland. It’s not my direction.

Lutz: “Sure we were influenced by the USSR during the cold war but we weren’t a communist dictatorship!”

No, of course not. There was a saying in East Germany: “We have a democracy wherein we vote for the same guy each time.” That was in the Deutsche Demokratische Republik…surrounded by barbed wire and landmines…you know, to keep the class enemy out. But they DID actually have elections.

Ok, maybe that’s a bit übertrieben as a direct comparison with Finland, but you might remember the Russian jets that flew overhead on a regular basis, and then the Finnish ones chased them back. I don’t think that little game was designed for the promotion of democracy…by either side.

“And you should blame the swedes for the high taxes”

True. After Sweden hid behind Finland’s back during WW2—and surely wouldn’t have helped in any emergency thereafter—Finland copied their system instead of developing it’s own.

Looking back, closer ties with Germany would have been better if possible. But it’s difficult to align the economies of a more business- and wealth-oriented economy (Ger) with a more Socialist one (Fin). The Socialist one always benefits disproportionately by being ‘pulled along.’

It makes negotiations difficult.

Ah, but therein lies the cornerstone of finlandisation. It was easier to believe Soviet propaganda when one didn’t have to live in the Soviet reality.

“it wasn’t like the schools had turned into commie re-education camps.”

The indoctrination was quite subtle, I can tell you that. Too bad I’ve thrown away my Kekkoslovakia-era textbooks. Too many moves.

For the Fennophones amongst us, here’s Niklas Herlin demanding a statue of Hitler in Helsinki (because some brainiacs are trying to get one erected for Lenin):

http://www.uusisuomi.fi/blogit/niklasherlin/hitlerpatsas-helsinkiin

By the way, winnie, that guy’s brother is a Billionaire. In euros, not toilet paper.

In lukio one of my history teachers got actually sued for saying “In my opinion, the socialist system is better” in class.

OK, there were some crazy local experiments elsewhere in Finland, such as ‘Pirkkalan moniste’, a marxist-leninist study material on history of Finland, but these and their authors were practically laughing stock already then. Quite soon a parody named “Prinkkalan moniste” was published and circulationg around.

Only ’70′s thing’ in my ‘backwoods’ school was a brief visit by some slightly hippie teacher trainee from Joensuu. Instead of the usual hymn no. 473 at morning prayer, he played Pekka Streng’s “Perhonen” (Butterfly). As a result our regular teacher sentenced us to detention for giggling at the prayers after making sure our reasons to giggle at flowers and butterflies in the song were totally innocent.

Sure we were influenced by the USSR during the cold war but we weren’t a communist dictatorship! Yes, the media was self-censoring content the presidents had to keep up warm relations and many finns were communists (*gasp* because they wanted to!) but it wasn’t like the schools had turned into commie re-education camps. I thought they were working pretty well even in those days?

And you should blame the swedes for the high taxes (I’m not btw, welfare state FTW!) instead of Russians, they are the ones who came up with this welfare state anyways!

I have a story for you. In the early 19th century there was a smart Swedish guy called John Ericsson. He was to become one of the premier inventors of the railway locomotive in the 1820s, the ship propeller in 1830s and -40s, the ironclad battleship in the 1860s and the torpedo in the 1870s and -80s.

To realise his inventions he had to move to the United Kingdom and later to the United States. Today, he has a National Memorial dedicated to him in Washington, D.C.

Imagine he had stayed in Sweden. There is no way he could have gained the possibility or amassed the capital to build a railway locomotive, for example. Railways demanded huge capital inputs and a existing, high class heavy industry. Though it bankrupted its first builder, the first railway in Sweden was completed in 1849, 20 years later Ericson had built his working locomotive in England.

Later, in the United States, Ericsson could work within the large ship industry and design the USS Monitor, a historic ironclad, which was built in 1862 with state support. It proved a success in the Civil War and three years later, the Swedish Navy commissioned a similar ship. Without the success in America, would Ericsson have had any possibility to push through such a outlandish, costly and unproven design if he had first come up with it in Sweden?

Though I may pushing a “great inventor”- story here against my better judgment (Ericsson was no way the only inventor working with these things, though he might have been the only Swede), I think his life is a testament to the benefits of big countries and economies of utilizing talent much more effectively, even disproportionately so, than smaller ones. For all his talent, Ericsson could well have lived as a small-time engineer in Sweden for the rest of his days – and Sweden still was one of the premier innovative countries of Europe during his time.

know a Finnish child prodigy who is now an adult. He was sent to Harvard, got his Ph.D. at a ridiculously young age and moved back to Finland to marry his teenage sweetheart and have kids. Last time I saw him he didn’t seem all that happy and was working for some generic IT company without much distinction. Education can only take you so far and I’ve always viewed traditional education before university as merely indoctrination for those not smart enough or motivated enough to do it for themselves as well as track you into a docile role in society. It’s necessary, but it doesn’t accomodate the truly bright kids very well.

Those smarter have a chance in university to blossom and to allow their creativity and imagination take them where their interests lie. So why isn’t this guy, along with countless other really smart people in Finland rocking their world? It’s not just numbers. It seems like all the Finns who are distinguishing themselves these days are outside of Finland with no plans to return.

The PISA test is about good general achievement. Innovation in Finland is, as mentioned, on per capita basis on a very good level. This rests on the broad basis of a well conducted basic education in mathematics and science. You have been writing about “great inventions” as a yardstick of the level of national innovation, which is, as I wrote above, a thoroughly oldfashioned concept.

Most “great inventions” tend to come from big countries with big market areas: this is precisely because those are the places it is most easy to break through at, in terms of capital availability etc. (I am sure Kristian will chime in about this). This does not mean people in those big countries would be somehow, on average, more innovative because of that, or even that their system would be better: it is more a matter concerning economies of scale and concentration of different resources. This also applies to places of learning: big countries’ top universities with a great catchment area, such as the MIT, can attractt more top level talents and “produce innovation” on a scale hard to match in small countries.

The vast increase in international links, co-operation and the availability of information of late (especially since WWII and the internet age) have levelled the field a bit, easily seen in the good performance of smaller societies like South Korea, Taiwan, Sweden or Finland, but the economies of scale remain.