London Embassy advertising Finland to British schoolkids
People live well in the North, close to nature, but not in some backwoods backwater. Children are red-hot at texting on their Nokia mobiles, even when they are out picking lingonberries amongst the bears somewhere. Some of them even ski to school - at least if you believe what they tell you at the Foreign Ministry.
The Finnish Embassy in London has opened a web portal for British schoolchildren under the name “Kidzone Finland”. The intention is to provide a broader picture of what Finland is like, through information and quizzes, explaining how life is in a country that is a blank spot for most British kids, who know little more than Tove Jansson’s Moomins, if even that.
Birdsong twitters in the background as Kidzone tells us that Finns send gazillions of SMS messages each year.
Older technology is also featured prominently: a massive icebreaker is pictured to show how Finland copes with its chilly winter.
Finnish design is not forgotten, either. “Finland is a very stylish country”, we are told, “When Emilia turned nine, her aunt sent her a Marimekko T-shirt”.
Emilia is one of three Finnish children with whom the English kids can play and interact in the pages.
One trick to pull in and hold the readers is a series of quizzes, and the winner of a competition can get a trip to Finland. The British children’s author Michael Morpurgo has agreed to serve as the jury for the competition. The writer has not visited Finland himself, but nevertheless believes that the Finns have a direct and caring attitude to their natural surroundings that the British kids could learn from.
As Kidzone reports: “Forests are well cared for in Finland, using a way that copies the forests’ natural life-cycle… If looked after properly and wisely, forests will always grow new trees. This makes them an important ‘renewable resource’”.
The British attitude to their natural surroundings is “more sentimental” in the view of Morpurgo. Cute domestic animals are cosseted like members of the family, but nobody has any qualms about slaughtering foxes, regarded as vermine.
“The same goes for children. If they are cute, they are spoiled rotten, but throughout history children have been treated in the most horrible fashion - enslaved, abandoned, beaten up.”
Morpurgo remembers well the furore that emerged at the beginning of the year over a European survey of children’s well-being. The Dutch won it, the Finns were on the podium or thereabouts, while the British children came at the bottom of the heap. As Morpurgo notes: “I guess the Finns are doing something right.”
The writer hazards a guess that unlike in the stiff and hierarchical British school system, Finns perhaps pay more attention to the main event - children’s wellbeing. In Britain, school classes can also be excessively large, at worst well over 30 pupils to a class.
The desks at the back in these giant classes in large faceless schools are occupied by pupils who cannot master the basics of English or of mathematics. Often they are not seen in class anyway, as it is relatively easy for the marginalised to vote with their feet and play truant.
As for Finland, Kidzone reports once again that: “Finland has come up with a system called the Welfare Society that means the government cares for people who most need it. This gives kids lots of rights!”
Michael Morpurgo does offer the reminder that Finnish kids and British children do have much in common, too, including the fact that in both countries many teenagers are regular and enthusiastic binge-drinkers.
The best idea of what Kidzone is about can be gained from visiting the site and logging in. It does not appear to require the sort of registration that will fill your e-mail inbox. The format is to provide information, and then to check understanding by a series of multiple-choice questions. Users can gain badges for their “backpack”, and by answering bonus questions they can get to see Moomin video-clips. It works quite smoothly. The venture is a British localisation of “Project Finland”, which was presented by the Finnish Embassy in Washington DC some years ago.