Roger Boyes' original analysis on Finland massacre

Blood in the classroom: nothing shakes a society as surely as bullet holes in the corridors of a local comprehensive.

Finland, which has one of the world’s best-performing school systems, has been locked in anguished debate since an 18-year-old shot dead teachers and pupils in November, bringing the horrors of the Columbine massacre to the suburbs of quiet, orderly Helsinki.

“Something went terribly wrong,” a Finnish teacher told me, flinching at the memory. “School should be a place of refuge.”

After years topping international education league tables in reading and mathematics, this is a society coming to terms with a deeper failure, a breakdown in communication. The conclusions it is drawing — to bring parents and teachers into an even closer nexus — are remarkable and provide an intriguing new model for Europe.

“At the end of every day we write up reports on each pupil and post them on the internet,” said Elisa Vilpas, a teacher at the Leppävaara comprehensive in Espoo, on the fringes of Helsinki. “If he or she writes a good essay, we record it; if they are late for school or don’t turn up, that gets registered too.” Parents are given a password that allows them to access the file on their children. “I also text them during the day and they message me back.”

Finnish schools all have a psychiatrist on call and a very active social counsellor. Pupils at Leppävaara school — a cheerful, sprawling place established in 1939 — tell me that there is no stigma attached to meeting them. “It’s good to talk, especially if you’re having problems in the family,” one teenager said.

The hunt is on to find fresh channels of communication with the families of potentially troublesome pupils. Parent-teacher evenings, though still useful, tend to be self-selecting, attended largely by ambitious parents who are already involved in the schooling of their children.

The new scheme was designed to cut the dropout rate, apparently one of the few blemishes on a system that regularly turns out top scores in the OECD international performance surveys. Dropouts have become a headache across the European Union: six million 15-year-olds left school without a qualification in 2006.

But the scheme is also being used to spot some of the problems that spurred Pekka-Erik Auvinen to pick up his newly acquired gun and slaughter eight teachers and pupils at the nearby Jokela comprehensive. The boy’s teachers regarded him as an above-average pupil, interested in history (especially Hitler and Stalin); his musician parents seem not to have spotted anything unusual.

Better communication between the staff, parents and pupils could have spotted trouble, symptoms perhaps of a self-destructive depression. The collapse of that triangle has been at the heart of massacres committed in US and German school corridors, from Columbine High in 1999 (12 students and teachers dead) to Erfurt grammar school in 2002 (16 people killed).

Could Finland, freshly scarred, be on the way to finding an early detection system for such disturbed teenagers, a kind of shooter radar?

“The guy was lonely and he was left alone with his problems, and that was wrong,” said Roman in Class 9B at the Espoo comprehensive. Roman is 15, has the whisper of a moustache and is the most articulate in a group of bright teenagers.

“That’s why I try to drag my friend Kaspar away from his computer games — what’s it called, Counter-Strike? — and get him to come to town, otherwise he would sit there playing all day.” The Counter-Strike manufacturer describes it as “the world’s most popular first-person shooter game”.

Kaspar sees that he is being teased but admits: “Yeah, sometimes I’m doing it four or five hours.” The pupils in 9B snort with derision: most are familiar with Counter-Strike and its shoot-to-kill scenography. No one spends only a quarter of an hour on the screen.

Before visiting the school I had talked to the writer and innovative politician Lasse Lehtinen, who had argued that schools needed more Big Brother-style supervision. Since classmates spotted unusual behaviour before teachers, schools should set up boxes in which pupils could express their worries about their friends.

“Wouldn’t work here,” grunted Tiimo, 15, an aspiring ice-hockey star. “We would just put funny comments in the box.”

The class agreed that school shooters were a boy problem. “Girls talk about everything, we don’t,” said one boy.

As the arguments about the teenage shooter bounce back and forth — I watch passively, merely relieved not to have been set upon by a baying mob of Nordic bloggers — it becomes clear that the issue is the changing nature of school friendship and not violent computer games or lax gun laws.

“The problem is the individualistic culture,” says Ms Vilpas. “Friends aren’t needed in the same way any more.”

I had been steered to the school by the Finnish Government. When Auvinen went on his shooting spree I wrote in The Times that it was “a very Finnish tragedy”, similar to American massacres in its planning and yet somehow tangled up with the winter darkness, with the isolation of adolescents, with the solace of the internet that allows self-doubting pupils to escape from a world governed by high scholastic performance targets into the shadows of sometimes sinister chatrooms.

The Finns hated the commentary: several hundred wrote to Times Online to say that I was peddling clichés, abusing their nation: the killer had been sick, and that was the end of the story. Shocked that the Finns had used a foreign paper to break their lip-biting silence, the country’s tabloids took up the cudgels. I began to feel like something of a murderer myself. One British media blog, Axegrinder, predicted that I would only be able to enter Finland again if in disguise.

I did the next best thing and returned to Finland via Lapland, in an aircraft full of British holidaymakers searching for the true Santa Claus. As disguises go it was not bad.

But after I had sidled through the doors of Leppävaara comprehensive I found that this winter’s anger had been replaced by a process of reflection that would have been unthinkable in a British school. The Finns are now looking more carefully than any other European society at how to prevent teenagers slipping through the net.

On paper Auvinen was a successful product of the Finnish educational system, on the road to university. But his problems had begun earlier, when he was 15.

It is precisely these 15-year-olds — natural truants, hormonal battlefields, unhappy with themselves, their teachers and their families but by no stretch of the imagination natural-born killers — that have become the target of Finnish policy. The plan to close the gulf between family and school was actually launched before the massacre, in September 2006, but it has intensified since the killings.

No expense is being spared to stop these teenagers dropping out or falling into themselves. “I know of schools where every single truant is literally tracked down,” says the Green League politician Heidi Hautala.

“We are now fighting for each one of these kids,” agrees Youssef Yousri, a teacher in Espoo. The school has put three classrooms and a coffee corner — sofas, a filter-coffee machine and a ghetto-blaster — at the disposal of 18 teenagers, some of whom have been playing truant for six months.

When I pop into the problem class I find them playing cards, listening to music. “We let them learn at their own pace,” says Mr Yousri. “And we learn everywhere in town, in cafés or whatever, so that they don’t associate learning with institutions.” He writes his instructions for the day on the blackboard in the form of a speech bubble coming out of a cartoon of his face. “They prefer to get orders that way, rather than directly from me.” There are now 70 such anti-dropout units across the country.

Teenage boys in particular, say Finnish pedagogic experts, have to be constantly remotivated, kept on track, given a reason for school-based education rather than just letting them graze on the internet.

“We offer them free breakfast in addition to the free school lunch,” says the headmistress, Pirjo Karhu. “The point is to get them here and to get them talking.”

Later in a nearby shopping mall I intercept one of the reintegrated truants. “Yeah, school is OK,” he grunts reluctantly. “Just don’t tell anyone that I said that.”

The bloggers bite back: the comments by Roger Boyes on the killing sparked outrage

It really makes me wonder what kind of staggering constellation of editorial and journalistic failures have allowed Mr Boyes to command a pencil, let alone call his appallingly misguided ramblings “analysis”.

Daniel, Tampere, Finland

I would like to call my friends and talk about this but I can’t, because it’s already dark and I’m feeling depressed. All I can do now is wait for the summer and just hope that my friends are still alive when It arrives. Thank God I still have my YouTube.

Riikka, Tampere, Finland

My comment regarding this article is that I, obviously in a very typically Finnish way, am speechless . . . there are simply no words to express the stupidity of discussing this matter in the way you do, Mr Boyes.

Mikael Hagman, Helsinki

Dear Mr Boyes, if this is all so typical and waiting to happen, why didn’t you warn the authorities beforehand?

Jussi, Tampere, Finland

I’d really like to get a closer look ot this article but it’s time for my monthly nightswim. Mr Boyes, if you ever visit Finland I have a free bed for you. Maybe we can go shooting wolves or something.

Janne, Hollola, Finland

You are very superficial, Mr Boyes!

Iris Kobek, Turku, Finland

From his English library, he has extracted some names from the Kalevala, calculated the average number of Finns per square km, and somehow equated the quantity of guns with this tragedy. Perhaps, as part of his next article in The Times, Boyes might do a little more research. Visit the country you are discussing.

Charles Sendry, Huntington Beach, California

Wow. This is the dumbest thing I’ve ever read.

Darren, Dallas, Texas

Today I rode a polar bear to school in the dark winter. It took me three hours to cover the 100km. And I also had to go round five lakes.

Finnish citizen, Vantaa

Dear Mr Boyes, Your article is simply awful.

Tommi Sievinen, Finland

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