Reading Michael Booth's "The Almost Nearly Perfect People" ethnograph on the Scandinavian countries, Mad Dog felt a wash of memory and experience surge over him.
Until a year ago, Mad Dog's only experience of Scandinavia had been mostly with people of Scandinavian descent he knew in America, or the odd Finn or Swede he ran into during his university years.
Mad Dog did get pushed into a trip to Norway in 1980, because his wife's mother was living in Oslo while her husband worked on the North Sea drilling platforms Mobil Oil was building there. This was years before Norway was actually able to extract oil from the North Sea, before it became the Saudi Arabia of Scandinavian, awash in oil wealth.
All Mad dog knew about Norway was it had fjords and blonds and he had read "The Moon Is Down" Steinbeck's rendition of the Nazi invasion and David Howarth's astonishing "The Sledge Patrol" about the resistance in Norway.
Mad Dog objects to going places where they don't speak English, but his multilingual wife assured him all the Norwegians spoke English because it's Scandinavia and not to worry.
Nobody spoke English in Norway, at that time, as far as Mad Dog could tell and neither he nor his wife spoke Norwegian, although his wife spoke pretty good German, which got you a lot of hostile stares in Norway, and having read about the German occupation, Mad Dog knew why.
More Norwegians, of a certain age, spoke German, but they didn't like Germans and Mad Dog's wife could easily pass for German, visually, and Norway was fun, but not a place Mad Dog thought he'd want to live or visit again any time soon.
Last year Mad Dog got hauled off, once again, to Scandinavia where, he was, once again, assured everyone speaks English, but this time it was mostly true. Over the past 30 years, apparently, English is taught in schools from Iceland to Finland and most of the kids speak pretty good English, which goes to show how good Scandinavian education is, as Mad Dog took 4 years of French and can barely order a meal in French, but these kids were very conversant. In fact, when a Finn talks to a Dane, they typically use English.
During his brief excursions from the safety of his Viking cruise ship, Mad Dog was able to ask English speaking Norwegians, Danes, Swedes and Finns what they thought of their healthcare systems. Their startled looks told a tale. "Our health care?" Why would anyone ask about their healthcare? This was like asking, "How do you feel about your mother?" Healthcare just IS in Scandinavia. It's there for you and it's good the way your mother is good when you stagger home with a fever or a bloody nose. Whenever he could, Mad Dog would peek into a clinic door, where he noticed the reception area did not have that first desk, the barrier to all American patients, where they ask for your health insurance card.
In these government clinics there were no money changers, no business offices, no secretaries processing insurance forms, just nurses and doctors.
Across the street from Mad Dog's childhood home in the Washington, DC suburbs, lived a family named Juntilla, from Minnesota. The father had been shot down over Germany during the war, and was now a lawyer for the Justice Department and his main case seemed to be a lawsuit against "Playboy" and the fact it was mailed through the United States Postal service, which meant the Juntilla house was the place to be for all the neighborhood boys because, apparently, the lawyer needed to do copious background reading for his case, and there were stacks of "Playboy's" in the basement.
They also had a drop dead gorgeous daughter, who most of us ignored until she demonstrated she could throw a baseball adequately, and as our tenure was from age 9 to age 18, we didn't really see her until she got to be 13 and we were 18 and about to go off to college. Then we asked each other: who is that girl we thought we knew?
Mrs. Juntilla did not work. She never got a driver's license, but she drove her VW Minibus all the time, as every suburban housewife drove their kids around, and she smoked and looked amused as she talked to the neighborhood boys who hung out on her couches and in her kitchen.
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| Mrs. Juntilla, as I remember her |
She was the only mother in the neighborhood who was the least bit attractive, physically, and her blond, high cheekbone looks placed her somewhere between Grace Kelly and Eva Saint Marie. She looked glamorous, but she did not act glamorous. She grew up on a farm and everything about suburbia seemed to amuse her, as life was just too soft and comfortable and she could not believe the complaints she heard from the other stay-at-home mothers, who were living on easy street but still dissatisfied. (The fact is, another neighborhood housewife drank herself to death, and one up the street was wheel chair bound with multiple sclerosis, and two died of breast cancer, but overall, most of the women had typically comfortable, if mind numbing, suburban lives.)
Mrs. Juntilla made an exception for Mad Dog's mother, who taught at the high school and did not get home until five o'clock most days, which was one reason Mad Dog hung out at Mrs. Juntilla's house, although he was glad for the excuse because Mrs. Juntilla was very cool. She would have been right at home at Woodstock, although she would have been unimpressed by it. Bathing in the nude? Marijuana? How is that different from her Minnesota farm?
She told stories about the animals on her farm. Chickens, she said, were stupid. There was just no getting around that. But pigs were intelligent, if uncouth, and goats were just very weird. You could not fool a goat. Goats watched you and you had to respect goats.
Mr. Juntilla brewed homemade apple cider, hard cider in his garage with the enthusiastic assistance of his neighbor who worked for the CIA, and another who owned a bar. He lay on his couch on weekends, and read "Catch-22" and laughed until tears rand down his cheeks and when Mad Dog asked him why he liked the book so much he looked Mad Dog over and said, "Because this is the closest thing to what it was really like I've every read."
I never heard Mr. Juntilla speak Finnish, but whenever it snowed, which was maybe ten days a year in the DC suburbs, all the Juntillas got on their wooden skis and wool Finnish sweaters and they skied down the street to the highway at the bottom. You could do that then because the county only had 10 snow plows and the street remained unplowed for days, or until it got warm and melted.
The next time Mad Dog thought about the Finnish was as he was finishing his medical training and his department had a Spring party at a park and Viekko Koivisto, one of the young faculty, told Mad Dog he was moving his family back to Finland.
"But Viekko," Mad Dog expostulated, "You're the most successful guy we've got! You've published more and the stuff you've done is more important than just about anybody else. How could you leave? You're a star."
Viekko allowed himself a faint smile and nodded toward a gaggle of children chasing each other around a set of swings and jungle gyms, laughing, shouting, spraying each other with squirt guns.
"Look at those kids," Viekko said. "Can you tell me which ones are mine?"
Mad Dog looked at the kids and guessed maybe the tallest, blondest kids were Viekko's but they might have belonged to Hans, a German fellow, or Kurt, who was from Texas or Jan from the Netherlands.
"No," Mad Dog admitted. "I give up."
"That's my point," Viekko said. "I've got to get them home before they forget they are Finnish."
Reading Booth about Finland, Mad Dog learns that the Finnish school system is rated by some international program to assess the educational systems of about 80 countries, and it always comes in first or second overall, and usually first in math, language and analytical thought. They do this, starting kids in school at age 7, keeping them in class only 4 hours a day, assigning little homework and allowing for summer vacations. They do this without much formal testing until kids are about 18.
They do this with a system which is entirely government run, with virtually no private schools, which is free through college and even graduate school
They do this by making teaching jobs highly prestigious, requiring master's degrees in programs which have 10 applicants for every space. They do this by making sure every teacher is constantly re educated, updated on new material on new ideas about effective teaching techniques and thoroughly and frequently evaluated.
Booth, raised in England asks the reader to consider the "psychopaths and social misfits" who served as teachers in the UK or America.
The Finns ensure that no matter where your school is, in Helsinki or in the far reaches of the deep forests, your learning experience is identical. About 1/3 of all students get personal tutoring to bring them up to snuff whenever they fall behind in math or language or any subject. No child is left behind and every child is observed. They do this spending less on each child than we do in America and they do this for every child.
Mad Dog thought about a book club the Democratic Party organized in Exeter, New Hampshire. A lovely lady, in her fifties, showed up with a school text book she got from her high school son, from which she learned we have 3 branches in our federal government.
Once Mad Dog managed lift his jaw from his chest, he zoned back into this lady's explanation of how the three branches have more or less separate functions and there is this thing called "checks and balances." She seemed delighted to learn all this, at age 50 something, having graduated from a public high school 30 years earlier and never, apparently, having been taught any of this.
Mad Dog was about to ask her what branch of government this lady thought the upcoming Presidential election was about, and then he thought about asking her if she had ever heard of "The Constitution,"but, before he could choose which question, he was savaged by a swift and painful kick in the shin under the table from his stalwart and ever vigilant co conspirator, with whom he canvassed neighborhoods before every election. His co conspirator smiled daggers at him, and Mad Dog refrained.
As Booth relates, when he tried to interview Finnish adolescents, they were much the same as teenagers in the States or Britain: hormonal, monosyllabic, distrustful, about as cooperative as a prisoner being watched for signs he is a stool pigeon. But when they were tested by the international assessment folks, they do spectacularly well.
But why? Are they genetically smarter?
Talking to a variety of people who are supposed to know, or at least, who are supposed to have theories about this two things come up:
1/ There are virtually no immigrants in the group of Finnish students to pull down the average scores.
2/ The population is committed to the idea that education should be about education, not status. Ergo the absence of private schools.
Jobs, careers, opportunities are not based on whether to went to the "right" schools, which in every country which has a "right school" really reflects class advantage.
Can you imagine an America, where the upper class would give up its bragging rights, of saying, "Oh, my son is at Princeton," or Harvard, Stanford, Yale etc?
We do not embrace equality in America. We thrive on inequality and striving.
The "American Dream" whatever that is, is all about "rising above" origins to make yourself bigger, better, richer, more privileged than the peons from whence you came.
Or, at the very least, they will be living at a higher rung than Hispanics, Blacks or dark skinned immigrants.
This is the problem Bernie has. The poor cleave to the idea that someday they will be rich, they will be riding around in the golden carriages, waited on by servants and vacationing in the Caribbean. Cinderella. Snow White. Aladdin. Disney's princesses, selected from the humble, living in toil and squalor. But does Disney ever look back at the folks Cinderella left behind? Does anyone care about whatever became of the Seven Dwarfs? Of course not. They are just dwarfs. Oh, no, they disappear. All that counts is Snow White or Cinderella has made it big.
In Finland, school children are taught to not call attention to themselves; do not try to steal the spotlight. This is true, to a greater or lesser extent in Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden, in about that order.
We the people, in America, love a pecking order and Bernie promises to destroy that.
