It was the day that Finns broke their silence, abandoned their legendary stoicism.

As flags fluttered at half-mast across the nation and candles lit in the icy wind, the survivors of the country’s first chilling school bloodbath tried to talk away their fears.

“Finns usually prefer to maintain a stiff upper lip during an emotional crisis,” said youth worker Jenni Lehtinen in Jokela church, an hour’s drive out of Helsinki. “This time it’s different — the kids cannot stop talking, asking where it is safe nowadays if not in their own school.”

As if to underline the new sense of insecurity in this most placid of Nordic societies, two armoured personnel carriers have been parked close to the school. Only the Army and the church, it seems, can reassure these young Finns.

The shooting spree by a disturbed 18-year-old student, Pekka-Eric Auvinen, has stunned the nation. In 20 minutes around noon on Wednesday — maths for some pupils, English for others — Auvinen used his newly acquired Sig Sauer pistol to kill the headmistress, the school nurse and six pupils. At least a dozen others were injured.

The traces of the disaster were still visible yesterday — windows smashed by the children as they tried to make a break for safety — as the police carried out a scientific examination.

This is not how Finland is supposed to be: its educational system is the envy of Europe and it regularly tops the international league tables. Finnish schools are famed not for the bullet holes in the staff-room door but for extraordinarily high levels of teaching. Classrooms are part of the re-branding that presents Finland not as a country of lumberjacks and paper-mills but of high-tech innovation led by the Nokia telecommunications group.

Yet Finland’s social problems have remained, and prompt little debate in this word-shy nation (Bertold Brecht, the German poet exiled to Finland, said it was the only country that could keep its mouth shut in two languages, Finnish and Swedish).

Auvinen’s YouTube entries should have provided a warning of where he was heading: tributes to the Columbine murders, snatches from films such as Natural Born Killers and Full Metal Jacket, images of Nazi leaders, a posed picture with his gun that he had named “Catherine”, visual nods to Jack the Ripper and the Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh.

“He was a social outcast,” Tero Haapal, one of the investigating detectives, said yesterday.

Yet in that sense he was not so unusual in a small-town community where teenagers feel excluded from everyday life.

Jokela is a remote dormitory suburb, full of broken marriages (Finland has the third-worst divorce rate in Europe after Belgium and Sweden); a commuter culture where fathers rarely see their children and where communal dinners are a thing of the past. The centre is a handful of scruffy shops, a pizza delivery service, a bus stop.

“I’m going to spend the night in the church again,” said Kati, 16, who saw a pile of bodies in the corridor of her school on Wednesday. She was placing a cluster of eight candles on a muddy grass verge near the high school. “I want to be with the others, not with my parents.”

Auvinen, it seems, had a particularly difficult relationship with his musician father. “Me, too,” says Kati, “Don’t we all? But I’m not going to shoot anyone because of it.”

A memorial service at the stark wood and red-brick church, now serving as a crisis centre, brought them together last night, the survivors, the lost children of the suburbs.

“The high school is what glued the young people to the community,” one case worker said. “Now they can’t trust it any more. That’s the true meaning of this tragedy.”

As the Finns gained the gift of tongues yesterday, the thrust of public debate centred on the menace of a no-hope self-destructive teenage culture. “Tighter school supervision, control of the internet, that will merely combat the symptoms but not the disease of nihilism,” said Sylvia Bjon, of the Hufvudstadbladet daily.

The core problem seems to be a kind of inner emigration. Young Finns used to head for Sweden and America in search of jobs. Now the economy is booming but it is increasingly globalised. Nokia generates a big chunk of Finnish wealth but employs only 28,000 people in the country.

Unemployment, concealed by any number of job-creation schemes, is high. So young small-town Finns are increasingly withdrawing into a shell, putting off having children of their own, drifting between short-term contracts. And the population is rapidly ageing.

“We’ve been living in a dream,” said a 57-year-old grandmother. “We thought we had become part of the New Economy and everything would be all right.”

For now, the surviving children are simply blaming the killer rather than society. “I’ve just been counselling one,” Ms Lehtinen, the youth worker, said. “She was full of anger. She said: ‘Why couldn’t he have lived and then be made to suffer for the rest of his life?’ ”

And what did she reply? “Nothing,” shrugged the social worker. “What is there to say?” Sometimes, it seems, silence really is the best option.

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