The youth of Finland seems to be living on a short fuse. Only ten months after the Jokela school shooting — eight dead that time — there is again blood in the corridors and classrooms of a college in this apparently placid and consensus-loving country.

Early indications are that the latest assault was a bid for similar global notoriety. The Jokela slaughter last November stunned Finland and placed the killer, Pekka-Erik Auvinen, on the growing roster of desperate male teenagers ready to release their frustrations with a gun. Like Jokela, the latest shooter carefully planned the attack: from the timing, soon after the start of the academic year, to the YouTube manifesto, it was an act of theatre.

Auvinen’s YouTube message was a rambling Nietzschean tirade together with some clumsy attempts to demonstrate his shooting skills. No matter — before it was taken down it was viewed by thousands. Something similar happened in the case of the Kauhajoki killer. Sad to say, he had been motivated by no more than a desire for internet celebrity.

School massacres feed off each other, and plainly the youth who blasted his schoolmates learned from Auvinen; Auvinen in turn had been in touch with a would-be American shooter.

Yet at the risk of howls of displeasure from Finnish readers — who raged at my commentary on Jokela — it has to be said that there is something disturbing going on in their proud, self-regulating Nordic culture. After not one, but two massacres in a year, it is time that the Finns looked hard and close at their children.

After Jokela — an average school in Tuusala, an average dormitory suburb of the Finnish capital — my argument was that the Finns were letting down their young generation, allowing them to slip into a kind of psychological isolation. In small-town Finland — with nothing much to do except hang around in cliques forged in school, with the days shortening, with parents absent and the geographical distance between the homes of classmates unusually long — traditional friendship was slipping away and being replaced by social networking sites. Although all Finnish schools have psychiatrists, they are overworked. Teachers geared to ensuring exam results are failing to spot depression. And in a society with a hunting tradition, guns are readilly available.

Well, young Finnish readers deemed this to be a parade of stereotypes. There was, they said, nothing specifically Finnish about the Jokela tragedy. If anything it was an American import, or a disease easily spread by the internet and video-game makers.

In short, there was nothing much to be done — apart from mourn the pupils and teachers caught in the sights of a mentally deranged killer.

Now, it has happened again. Time, surely, for the Finns to ask themselves a few questions. Or would that be unpatriotic, un-Finnish, rocking the boat?

After Jokela, I was invited to a Finnish school to help to dispose of my prejudices. Situated on the outskirts of Helsinki, it was indeed an impressive place. Great effort was being invested in integrating immigrants, helping them to come up to scratch in Finnish. The reason why Finnish schools always do so well in international school league tables is that they try so hard to bring up class averages. Nobody is left behind. In one class a very bright Russian immigrant teased his native-born Finnish ice-hockey obsessed mate and declared: “Jokela couldn’t happen here — he would have talked over his problems with friends.”

But later I visited a special, almost quarantined, part of the school, a block that sought to bring drop-outs back into the system. It was well intentioned. The teenagers were given free breakfasts and fresh coffee to get them out of bed. They had classes when they wanted but mainly played cards and listened to music. They were plainly an embarrassment to many teachers, part of a government scheme that had been hatched before Jokela. The truth is that they were there to improve the statistics of the education system. The kids, nice but withdrawn, needed a different kind of help. Other children in school regarded them as freaks.

No, they betrayed no signs of latent violence: they were not reaching for their guns. But they had been set aside by a society still striving for a kind of perfection, a social democratic utopia. The Jokela killer was not spotted because, said his class teacher, he got good marks; interest in him stopped at that point. Perhaps the Kauhajoli killer was also being earmarked by the teachers in his catering college as a promising restaurant manager.

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found