Those of you who are retired have probably heard some variation on the question, “What do you do with your time now that you aren’t working?”  I’m always a bit amused by the question myself, for it seems to suggest that work-for-pay is the totality of a person’s life.

While that may be true for some, for many others retirement is a marvelous opportunity to do many of the kinds of things that couldn’t be fit around a job.

 

I mention this simply because, when I am asked how I am spending my retirement time,  I always take the occasion to talk about Finlandia Foundation Seattle Chapter and the good  things it is doing on behalf of all-things-Finnish in our locale.  Of course, most of my non-Finnish or non-Finnish-aware friends know little of our chapter or the work it does.  I enjoy telling them about the monthly film series, the annual Independence Day Dinner Dance, the bi-annual Finland Summer Festival, as well as such special events as the upcoming reading and book signing by Stina Katchadourian, author of The Lapp King’s Daughter, on October 5 at the Swedish Cultural Center. 

 

Despite the fact that many outside our local Finnish community may not have heard of Finlandia Foundation Seattle Chapter, they almost always have some knowledge of Finland – nearly always positive.  It used to be that Americans praised Finns for paying their war debt.  Now, it is more common for our fellow citizens here to have heard of Nokia (though a surprising number still think this is a Japanese company) or to be aware of the highly-rated Finnish educational system.  In that regard, some of you doubtless attended the “Meaningful Movies” series at the Keystone Congregational Church in Seattle on September 16 and saw the excellent documentary, The Finnish Phenomenon:

Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System.  What seems to make this school system so surprising is its enviable success in educating Finland’s youth without many of the things now fashionably thought to be essential to success in the United States – standardized tests, merit pay, charter schools, weakened teacher unions and so on.

 

After I started this message, I went out for a couple of hours this evening, and, sure enough, when the topic of Finland came up, a well-educated, cosmopolitan friend expressed her admiration for Finnish education.  There is, naturally, some danger in over-hyping this mark of international achievement.  Finland’s schools are not perfect, nor are they necessarily replicable elsewhere in the world.  An educational system, like any socially-constructed system, develops out of a unique environment.  Finnish education reflects Finnish society, in the same way that American education reflects American society.  That does not mean that nothing can change, but it does suggest why change is often difficult.

 

After another summer in Finland, I came away with the sense, once again, that this is a place where institutions generally work.  Under girding these institutions is still a relatively small, quite homogeneous, consensus-based society.  Yes, there are certainly political divisions, with the meteoric rise of the Perussuomalainen Puolue (True Finn Party) a sure indicator of that.  But this party is, ultimately, an expression of change occurring in the demographic composition of  Finland – a country where immigrants from places like Somalia challenge the traditional view of what it means to be a Finn, thus sometimes generating xenophobic and racist responses..

 

Certainly, Finland has its share of challenges, and, in our enthusiasm to praise such achievements as the Finnish school system, it does little good to ignore the room for improvement in Finnish society.  We can best honor Finland by celebrating its successes whenever we have the opportunity and by being equally willing to talk with one another and others about its unfinished business.  In that way, Finland will be more than a stereotype of a country that pays its international debts or has a great educational system.  It will be the increasingly complex 21^st Century country that better represents current reality.                      

Gary London, President