Daisy Sindelar: Dr. Pasi Sahlberg, welcome to Weight of the World. You were raised in a family of educators – many generations of educators, in fact. And this included your father, who was the head of a two-room schoolhouse in rural Finland, where you went to school as a child. A two-room schoolhouse can sound very quaint to anyone who went to a large elementary school with hundreds of children. Paint a picture for us. What were your school days like? 

Pasi Sahlberg: People say that time makes your memories better and better. Our family lived in the school, and so the classroom was next door to where I had my room. Basically the classrooms in that two-room schoolhouse were my playground. They were really fun places after school, but also during the school days. My memories of primary school are really positive and good. A lot of play, and a lot of outdoor things, and a lot of fun things. Going to school at 9 o'clock in the morning and by 1 or 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it was all done. And then it was all play. So, good memories. 

You've written about sneaking into the schoolhouse when classes were over and teaching your own imaginary classes. So it seems only natural that you followed family tradition and became an educator yourself. You began as a high school math and science teacher. What did you learn from those early years as a teacher about what students need to thrive? 

Because my memories were very positive – kind of playful, childish things from my own school days, particularly primary school – this idea of teaching mathematics or science, which are often subjects that people don’t like much or aren’t very interested in when they’re teenagers, they also need to be playful and fun and curious. And so I guess I inherited that very important aspect of teaching and learning from those early years. And unfortunately, I think too many teachers only realize the value of using your imagination and creativity and playfulness when it’s too late. And I think that’s one of those things that I would really love to find a way to change. To equip these young teachers going into their first classrooms to believe in a little bit of a childish perspective on things, and understand that all of the things that their kids will be exposed to in the class should be fun and interesting. Because that’s the only way they can really make something useful out of their [classes]. 

Mathematics is like music. It’s full of games, it’s a mind game. When I was teaching mathematics, I did a lot of real-life modelling [based on] what you can find in your kitchen or home. Things like how many sheets of paper there are in a toilet-paper roll, or how many times you can brush your teeth with a [single] tube of toothpaste. You’re already thinking mathematically, and then it becomes a source of real curiosity. 

But probably these days, teachers have less time to ask these kinds of questions than before. In many places, they’re not allowed to ask these kinds of questions, because teaching these days is much more about just training, drilling kids to answer the questions right in a test. When I was a teacher in mathematics, we didn’t know anything about [standardized] testing. I didn’t even know that anything like that even existed. So I could teach whatever I wanted. And that’s where the power of pedagogy kicks in – when you have a passion, and you feel that you can create things with the kids and just make it work. 

Finland consistently ranks as one of the best countries in the world when it comes to student proficiency in math, science, and reading. And people often talk about the ‘Finnish education miracle.’ Can you describe for us briefly the pillars of the Finnish education system? What makes it so unique? 

The first thing I want to say is that there's no ‘miracle’ in Finnish education. You look at the numbers, and the fact that this kind of small country in the middle of ice and snow with no reputation whatsoever of being an education nation can all of a sudden do something like this… the pillars are [in fact] very simple and basic things. 

First of all, we’ve always believed that we should find the best way to educate all children in a similar school system. What you’ve seen in many other countries – Sweden, for example, or other Scandinavian countries or most European countries – is that they have two different systems. One for those kids who happen to have educated parents, or wealthier parents, who can give their kids the kind of environment where they can learn and develop, go further. So they have a separate system of schooling, or different tracks. And then those who don’t have this luxury – normal people like myself – they get whatever’s left. We in Finland never believed in that. We always thought that we have to find a way where we can bring everybody together and make sure that we change the way schools work in a way that is good for everyone. So this is principle number one – a strong belief in public education as the best way to educate everyone. 

I think the other thing, then – and it’s closely linked to this – is a deep understanding of the nature of childhood and children. Who are the students? Who are children when they’re learning? What do they actually need? Many other [countries], you know – if you look around the world now, or 30 or 50 years ago – they thought about education systems as serving the needs of adults. Kids were seen as raw material that were prepared through schooling to either enter the labor force or higher education, whichever it was. Finland never thought like this. 

And then the third pillar is obviously the teacher, how we perceive the role of teachers here. Educators in the school, and educators in the nation as well. There was early recognition in Finland that teachers are professionals, just like medical doctors or lawyers. They have to be trained and prepared in a similar way. But they also need to be given the same type of autonomy and collective agency in their work. Meaning that teachers need to not only have a voice, but they need to have authority in deciding what to teach, how to teach, and how to evaluate their students, obviously together with [national] policies and regulations. 

Those three elements are fundamental features of the Finnish tradition of education. It’s not a miracle. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Many others, I think, have somehow lost their way in this kind of beautiful art of education, when education has become too much a kind of compulsory obligation rather than the human right that it is, and always been in Finland. 

I want to have you talk us through a hypothetical situation where you have two children living in the same neighborhood but with very different needs. So let's say you have one student who would be considered disadvantaged in some ways. Maybe they come from a low-income family or a single-parent household. They have a learning disability like dyslexia. The second student comes from a more stable environment. Two parents, prosperous family, no learning disabilities. What happens to these two students as they enter the Finnish school system? In what ways are they treated differently and in what ways are they treated the same? 

First of all, if you remember the earlier conversation, in Finland, the number-one characteristic is the universal public school system. So the first thing that would happen to the two different children that you describe is that they would most likely go to the same school and probably be in the same classroom, regardless of their family backgrounds. But the other thing is that, even before they enter school, both of these children – particularly the one with more needs and the experience of being disadvantaged – would have already received much more support from society, through healthcare and support to the family, than would probably happen in many other countries. We don't segregate or separate students into different classes or groups or schools here in Finland. 

In some cases, what I'm describing might be a theoretical thing, but it still works in most places like this. But now, as we are forced to spend more and more money on military and defense, the only place you can take the money away from is education. And when money comes away from education, it often comes away first from special education, classroom assistance, additional support, and all the things that would be necessary in the situation that you described, unfortunately. 

One other aspect of Finnish education is that children are given a hot meal every day for free. Why is it important for children to receive a free meal at schools?

All the evidence is there. If anybody wants to have an evidence-based solution to improving our schools here in Australia or in the United States, just feed the kids. It's cheap and it's effective. It pays off immediately when kids are healthier, when they eat well. You can see that in the learning outcomes, you can see that in attendance and well-being and many other things in schools. One thing that Finland does well with the school-meal issue is that it provides all the kids not only healthy meals, but it provides every child every day with a half-hour moment to sit down with their friends and have a meal and conversation. And I think in a time like this – when the world is crazy and nobody knows what's going to happen and there's a lot of well-being issues and mental health issues – this is what young people need. They need these moments in the middle of a busy day, when they are being pushed more and more to learn and perform and be successful, to sit down with their friends, have a good meal, relax and have a conversation. And this is becoming equally important to just giving the kids some nutrition. 

Education systems, at their best, are not only meant to create a positive learning experience for children. They're also an investment in the long-term health of any society. What is the correlation in Finland between childhood education and civic engagement, say, among the adult population? Do happy, well-educated children grow into civically engaged adults? 

It's a great question. And you're absolutely right that Finland has for a long time paid a lot of attention to not only educating young people to be good in mathematics and reading and science, but also to understand the basics of civics and the importance of that. It's very difficult to actually argue, with evidence, that we have a more actively engaged civil society in Finland because of our type of education system. 

We have the same issues that many other countries have, that young people are not necessarily very engaged or excited enough about politics to enter into political issues and take part in voting and all those things. But I guess that the [educational] foundation that Finland has had, and the strong foundation in civics and civic literacy, has led to a society where people are fairly actively engaged in all kinds of things. I think Finland still has the largest number of non-governmental organizations and associations in society that people can participate in. I think that’s probably part of the way we emphasize those things in school. 

I think the important notion here – and this is my opinion – is that it’s very difficult to teach civics. It’s difficult to teach children to be active citizens. You have to design schools in a way that kids [automatically understand] that they will be part of decision-making and dialogue and conversations in school, rather than adults deciding everything and just telling the kids afterwards. 

Finland has also gained a lot of attention for making media literacy part of its school curriculum, even for very young children. How does that work? 

It starts in daycare when children are 3 or 4 years old, at the same time as they’re learning how to read and communicate information. I think that part of the Finland's success in media literacy and digital literacy, educating [children to be] more critical consumers of information, is part of this long-term approach, rather than what I see in some other countries, which is that we begin to pay attention to critical thinking or critical reading-literacy issues only after kids have already learned how to consume or not consume information – at about 15 or 16 years old in high school. 

I think the interesting thing now is that we’re just passing the fourth year of the illegal invasion of Russian troops in Ukraine. And that has been all about the media war as well, that people don’t quite know what’s true and what’s not. In Finland, we already have [several] generations of people who have gone through that type of [media literacy] education. So I think that Finnish people, young adults particularly, are much better prepared to ask hard questions compared to perhaps their parents or my generation, when that type of education was not necessarily in place, let alone many of those countries that are only now waking up [to the threat of disinformation]. 

And it’s not only Russia. Think of the other side – the United States is an equally important thing to keep in mind when you think, what can I trust and rely on? If I read the news, how do I know that this is based on good journalism and facts? And I guess that many countries around the world are thinking exactly the same thing: how do we help our young people make sense of this crazy world that they’re living in? 

Yes, so let’s move to the global environment. Your career has taken you from being a teacher to the Finnish Education Ministry to positions at the World Bank and Harvard and now the University of Melbourne – from which you're speaking to me today – and many points in between. Throughout, you've been sought as an expert on education reform, and you've used your position to challenge a lot of the commonly held notions you've mentioned, standardized testing and a few other things, as not necessarily being the best way to promote learning. At the risk of oversimplifying, you think many governments support the idea of students spending more time behind desks and more time taking tests. Tell us why you disagree. 

Even the simple, basic, early AI models that we’ve had available [up to now] can pass secondary-school final examinations far better than any human can do. If your success in school is determined by [how well you perform] on your test scores, then of course we can say that machines and AI can do those things much better than we do. Somebody has said that we are preparing second-class robots now in schools, rather than first-class humans. I think that understanding this human-ness is important. 

I'm not saying that learning to read and write and do mathematics and basic things isn’t important. I think it's very important, and I'm saying this as a former mathematics teacher. But if we’re staying that [testing] is the only thing that determines your success or failure in a school, I think we’ve already lost the game. So that's why the standardized assessments that are now used in many or most cases to rank students, to say how good they are – like here in Australia – depends on their standardized test results rather than these qualities that we were talking about earlier, like how good they are in terms of critical thinking or creative thinking, or how good they are at understanding the principles of how their societies work, [the principles] of democracy and other things. Those things play no role in these assessments [unless they come up as] theoretical questions of conceptual understanding. 

There’s a lot of global debate over the amount of time that children spend in front of screens, both in school and out of school. Many children now grow up feeling more comfortable typing on a keyboard than they do writing by hand. What happens to a child’s development when they’re spending more time in front of screens and less time engaged in tactile learning, like writing by hand? 

The first thing I want to say is that we need to avoid this kind of categorization of things as black and white. First of all, we know that children, and the way they consume digital media technologies – what we often call screen time – are all very different. Some of them are using screens and technology to create and design and produce things. They're using it to express their own selves, and making themselves even better at creating things. But then there are those [children], and probably the majority of people overall, who are just consuming digital media and entertainment. And that's where these questions come up. 

Let's say somebody spends an average of eight hours with a screen every day. What are these people not doing during those eight hours? We know very well: They don’t sleep that much. [Screen time] often takes place at night or early in the morning. They don’t read books – that’s a very important thing, to take up a book and just read. And they don’t move that much. If you’re a very young person, you don’t play that much anymore. This deprivation or decline of playtime globally very heavily correlates with the increase in screen time. So you can say that young children – I’m talking about primary school, children who are 12, 13, or younger – the time for them to play at school and outside school has collapsed over the last 20 years. For me, these are concerning facts and the thing that I try to figure out is what actually happens to these individual children who spend eight hours or more with the screen. 

You’ve mentioned play several times during the course of this conversation. Teaching should be playful, children should have time to play – and by that you mean not gaming, but active, physical play. Why is that important in helping a child develop? 

There's a lot of research about what we call play deprivation. Studies show that it increases anxiety. People don't move that much anymore. So it's bad for your body. And loneliness and social anxiety and many other things kick in when children don’t play. So that’s kind of an easy answer. 

I guess the more interesting way to look at the question of what happens when we play is that play is probably the most natural and easiest way to give children an opportunity to be in a situation where they can react to the world in a kind of natural way. Curiosity, imagination, creativity, communication – those things that you often find in a rich, playful situation like an outdoor playground or a forest. 

Sir Ken Robinson, who was a good friend of mine and passed away five or six years ago, was a champion of this idea, that imagination is what makes us human. He also said that curiosity is the engine of learning and that without curiosity, learning rarely happens. These are things that happen naturally in a rich, playful situation. And that’s why we need to do it much more than we’re doing right now. We also need to teach young people, children, and their parents about the value of this type of play and why play is important. When we think about play as just a waste of time or as a reward – “if you do your homework or do a good job at school, I’ll give you 15 minutes to play” – that’s the worst thing we can do to kids, because they quickly learn that play is something they have to earn rather than their right as a child or a young person. 

Right now you’re living in Australia, which recently became the first country to ban social media for children under 16. And I believe you have two teenage children yourself in the Australian public school system. So obviously an enormous number of countries are watching Australia with interest to see how this social experiment plays out. What's your view on how this ban is working so far?

It's probably fair to say that it might be a little bit too early to say exactly whether this law works or not. I can just use the anecdote of my own family here, that we tried to do this in December when the law came into effect. We tried to take this [seriously] and show our kids that if it's a law, we had to obey the law and respect it, whether we like it or not. But it didn't last too long before the kids came and said, ‘Aha, we found a way to get around it, and now I’m back on social media.” They’re not extremely heavy users of those things. But you know, because we’re immigrants here from Europe, many of their friends are in Europe and Finland and Croatia and elsewhere. So they need some of these platforms to stay in touch with them. And obviously, young people in another country that doesn’t have this law don’t understand why [my sons] suddenly can’t communicate through this channel when this is something they’ve been doing for a long time. So they're back to the old normal, in a way. 

I was just talking to one of my colleagues here a couple of days ago and she said that she just finished interviewing 1,000 teenagers here in Australia and she said that basically every one of them is back where they started. So I guess this evidence leads me to say that it seems like this law that had a lot of global media hype is probably not going to do the thing that people were hoping it would. 

I think the politicians and we adults underestimated the complexity that young people see around them in the world – all these wars and racism and violence. All things that they’re exposed to every day through normal media and radio and TV. You know, their world is complicated. It’s a much more difficult thing for them to understand than it was for us. And then a government comes along that says that they’re going to take away from young people basically the only thing that theyr like, which is the social media that allows them to connect and be connected to others. I’m afraid that there are a lot of young people who saw that as a very violent, aggressive, unnecessary act by adult society. 

I'd like to turn to the United States a little bit. This is not only a place where you have lived and worked, it's also the country to which your great-grandfather immigrated during World War I. What did it represent for your family overall? And how has that changed, if at all, in recent years? 

I've lived about 10 years of my life in the U.S. Two different times – first in Washington, D.C. and then in the Boston area. It was actually my grandfather, my father’s father, who went to the United States when he was 17, for education. He was educated at the Brooklyn Technical [High School] in New York and became a prominent engineer. He learned all kinds of the manual skills you needed to build ships and buildings and many other things there. So his stories were all about the United States as an education nation, as a place for opportunity and advancement in many areas, particularly in engineering. But he also kind of instilled in me a view of the United States as something special when it comes to humanity and helping people like himself to become the better or best versions of themselves that they can be. 

And so these were the stories I heard from him. There were actually very much the stories that I carried with me when my first opportunity came 25 years ago to live and work in the United States. I came with this idea of something special when it comes to cultivating people, lifting them up. And somehow I feel a little bit sad – quite a bit, actually – when I see that a big part of those values and principles are no longer there, or not recognized. 

Let's talk specifically about changes in the education system in the United States. The Trump administration is taking pretty radical steps to reshape the federal government, and this includes calling for the complete elimination of the U.S. Department of Education. That includes the reduction of federal funding for things like special education, for civil rights awareness, or student aid for low-income families. What concerns do you have specifically when you look at childhood education in the United States? 

The first thing I need to say is that there is not really a [single] U.S. education system there. There are 50 states and 14,000 districts and education is the responsibility of each and every state. Education is funded through the property tax, in a peculiar way at the local level. So it’s probably more fair to say that what happens at the federal level of the Education Department doesn't necessarily influence a lot of places, a lot of systems like California or New York or Massachusetts. 

But what it does do, as you described, is that it dismantles the federal education departments whose role has primarily been to support disadvantaged children and children with special needs. And this is all about the equity of the system. And that I think what’s probably more important than the fact that they’re doing away with the Department of Education is the sign, the message that comes with that. Which is that we don’t really care about what happens to those millions of children who need those additional funds or support from the federal government. I understand that only about 8 or 9 percent of the total funding of U.S. childhood education is federal money, but that is extremely important if the United States wants to have a kind of equal system of education and service for everyone. 

So I think that these four years, or what is left now [of Trump’s term] without the Education Department can do a lot of damage, particularly for those who have much less and who need more from the education system. 

But the strength of the American system is that, unlike much of the rest of the world, the vast majority of children are in public school, which is still the foundation of American society and democracy as well. So as long as the States are putting everything they have into ensuring that American education remains public, and that the privatization via charter schools and many other initiatives doesn’t break this fundamentally important part of American society, then I think the system is strong enough to survive four years or maybe even eight years. But I do hope that some sense and wisdom – and heart, as well – will win at some point, and that we’ll return to times as they were. 

You and I are speaking in the wake of the deployment of U.S. federal ICE and border control agents to the Minneapolis area, and not only Minneapolis. ICE tactics have included situating themselves outside of schools in order to target parents during dropoff and pickup periods. Having heavily armed forces menace schools seems like just the latest iteration of what has been an increasingly violent culture in American schools. And this is a culture that unfortunately includes not only bullying and cyberbullying, but also gun crime, active shooter drills, and the like. I don’t think anyone would argue that these are good conditions for children to learn in. But I wonder if you could describe how, precisely, the risk of violence impacts a child’s ability to learn. 

I can't even imagine it. When I look at what’s happening in Minnesota or some other areas, I only know what I see on the news or I can read in newspapers, but I just can't – I just can’t – put myself in the situation of a young person who wants to learn and wants to go to school, and has all these fears. Not only what happens at the school gate, or what may happen inside the school, but all these other things in society. If you’re scared all the time, what we know from psychology and common sense is that you can’t focus, you can’t open your mind and improve yourself through knowledge and learning. So it must be extremely complicated for the children in these extreme situations that you’re describing. 

But I think that the whole culture of schooling, the lack of safety and security in school, has really [gotten worse] over the last 20 years. When I was in the U.S., I went to see some of the high schools in New York and Boston and Washington, D.C., and you have to go through a metal detector. It’s harder to get into a high school than it is to board an airplane at the airport. I can’t imagine how these young people feel, what this experience is like for them. Compare this to schools in Finland or here [in Australia], where anybody can walk in. In Finland, you can go to any school, you can just walk in, you can go to a classroom and sit down and see what’s going on there. It’s a public place and people have access to it. And when children see that people can easily walk in and out, it gives them the idea that school is a safe place, it’s a warm place, it’s a welcoming place for everyone, rather than something that will be controlled and where security measures are everywhere. My mind is not ready to even try to explain what happens in such situations, but if kids are not learning well in schools in America and places like this, no wonder. I think we should never blame them or ask them to try harder or work longer. We should look at what type of society and world we’re putting them into before we ask them to perform or do these things any better. 

One thing that hasn't come up in our conversation so far is the role of AI in education. And of course, it's an astounding tool when it comes to delving into information. It is also a source of great concern for people who were raised before AI in terms of the impact it has on children's ability to communicate and express themselves through writing. Very often they are using functions like Chat GPT to generate answers to essay questions and the like. I'm interested in your point of view on this generally, but also specifically in terms of how it affects a child's ability to express themselves through writing and what is lost when a child is not able to do that. 

Writing with a pen longhand is something that everybody, in my opinion, should learn to do. I would love to see, for example, my own boys’ schooling involve a little bit more of this so that they would learn to value using paper and pen to write and take notes, rather than always walking around with their iPads. 

I see that there’s now high risk in the fact that generative AI is now able to do many things, including high school [final] examinations, much better than students can. And if we don’t know what to do with these things or if we’re not able to educate or prepare our young people to [understand the challenges of AI], it will make many people much dumber in the long run than we can actually imagine. It’s all about how prepared our teachers and schools are to cope and deal with these issues. Are teachers and schools ready to take on the role of teaching about these things? It’s very difficult to prepare millions and millions of teachers to do this. It’s much easier to just take the devices away for a while and just let children go be creative, to collaborate, read, write, use their hands, move – those types of things. Because in your later life, when you go to high school and university and work, it will be all about working with these machines. So it’s a huge, huge question. 

Pasi, we always end these interviews by asking for advice. Much of the democratic and social unraveling that we're seeing right now in the United States can be said, to some degree, to have its roots in a crisis in education. There's a growing awareness that whatever happens next, it's not going to be a wholesale return to past notions of what constitutes a good education model. And the system to some degree is going to have to be rebuilt from scratch. So as an education expert, and a global observer of how societies can best help children learn and thrive. What advice would you give Americans and really anyone who's concerned right now about how to nurture democratic values and critical thinking in future generations? 

You know, if I had a quick answer to this, I would be somewhere making a lot of money advising people how to do this. But going back to my grandfather's story and my own experience, the history of education and schooling traditions in America is amazing. Eighty percent of all the innovation and progressive thinking [worldwide] about schooling, teaching, and learning, and about leadership and assessments, are American ideas. So we should never forget this, that the knowledge and skills and traditions and historical culture are there. Some of the most prominent researchers and scholars in the field of teaching and learning are American. 

So if there's one thing, one piece of advice that I would love to give at this moment of disruption and crisis, when we are seeing fundamental transitions in our values and policies and politics, this would be my advice to everyone in the United States: Do everything you can to protect your public education system. As soon as the public education system begins to dissolve – and by that I mean parents taking their children away [from their local public school] and putting them in school somewhere else, or homeschooling them because they feel public schools aren’t able to do things anymore – then serious trouble will appear. I don’t see much hope for the future if we let go of the publicness of education. Because public education – everywhere in Europe, in all the nations of Europe, Finland included – public education is the cornerstone of democracy. It's a cornerstone of a socially cohesive society, because that's the only place where we can have most of society – people from different walks of life – be together at the same time and learn to be with one another and learn to respect differences and different points of view. If we let that thing go in the United States, it's going to be a difficult thing. Let's campaign to protect public schools and public education with teachers who are given the trust and responsibility to do their best every day. 

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You can listen to this conversation by following Weight of the World on Spotify and Apple. This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.