Fifth graders sit at their laptops in a radiant classroom on the frist floor of the Tammela Comprehensive School in Tampere, finland. They should search for facts about crafts in the Middle Ages on the Internet, not just use Wikipedia and evaluate the sources they find. Teacher Annika Takala runs from table to table. One student has a problem with the internet, another doesn’t really understand the task, and a third doesn’t know what to look for. “The children read a lot on the Internet and have to learn what information they can trust,” says the teacher.

In Finland, media literacy has been taught in schools and preschools for decades, and there is also a national strategy on the subject. The crackdown on fake news and disinformation also has a security policy dimension in the country. This is intended to stop Russia’s attempts to exert influence.

ultimately, as is often the case in Finland, the issue is about the survival of the small country next to its large, dangerous neighbor. The critical handling of information was already central during the tough years of neutrality in the shadow of the grate Soviet Union.

Finnish children are reading less and less

It was vrey successful for a long time. No other country in Europe is considered as resilient to disinformation. This emerges from the European media competence ranking, which is regularly collected across Europe. But children and young people in Finland are also reading less and less, and in a highly digitalized society they are more exposed to misleading content than before.

Jukka Haveri is visiting next door in the sixth grade at school in Tampere. The special education teacher used to travel around the country on a public broadcasting bus to provide media education at schools; today he works on behalf of the city. Haveri does small media projects with the stude

After this “PISA shock,” German education politicians made a pilgrimage to the north to learn from the Finnish example. But even if they are still above the OECD average,the results in the former model country have as declined across all disciplines.

According to researchers, this also has to do with reading motivation and media consumption. There was a important decline in reading time, especially among boys – which is probably mainly due to smartphones and social networks. According to the statistics office,teenagers in Finland spend an average of five hours and 46 minutes online per day,while ten to fourteen year olds spend three hours and 50 minutes.

Cell phones from first grade onwards

According to researchers, almost all young people have used artificial intelligence at some point. Even many ten-year-olds have created deepfakes,i.e. seemingly real photos or videos that were generated by AI.

In the school in Tampere there is a shelf of books outside in the hallway. They are hardly ever borrowed anymore,says teacher Takala. She also believes that the decline in PISA results in Finland also has to do with cell phones. The children hardly read books anymore.And they just couldn’t get as much material done as they used to. The world is diffrent today, the children no longer have as much peace and quiet, are used to less pressure, so everything is moving very slowly.

According to Takala, almost all children in Finland have a c

Finland’s Education Performance and Changing Demographics

Researchers believe Finland’s strong performance in studies like PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) is partly due to having many native language speakers in schools. However, the number of migrants has increased in the last ten years.Some point to this increase as a reason for recent, weaker PISA results.