Inside Finland’s education system | The Listening Post

A grinning purple cat. A bouncing yellow sun. A classic combination for any animators out to attract the attention of small children. But this video, produced by Finland's National Audiovisual Institute, has an important message about the media these kids are consuming. It's been designed to help pre-primary school children work out what's real and what's not. And what can be done if they're left scared or confused by what they're seeing. That's because in Finland, no one is too young to start thinking about the reliability of the information they encounter. The approach that we are promoting is that you have to start with very young children, before the school age. And you start with basic elements of media and understanding of what media is about. And then you build the understanding that there's always someone behind each picture and each story. And the older the children get, the deeper you go into these different parts of media and content creation and production. Media literacy is not one single subject. It's taught across all subjects. For example, in Finnish language and literature, we teach the basic skills. We talk about fake news, source analysis, media criticism. Then in maths, we might focus on statistics and algorithms. In art classes, students learn about images, how photos are edited. In history class, we discussed an air raid that took place during the Second World War, and thought about how the same incident could be taught differently, depending which side the country had fought on. It's very important that we don't just teach the subject matter, but also the analytical skills, who produced it, and for what purpose. Spotting fake news is a very real part of daily education here in Finland. Sometimes it's subtly woven into everyday subjects. Sometimes it's more specific. We're about to sit in on a class where 14-year-olds are learning all about myths, dis, and malinformation. Questioning and challenging claims like, the moon is made of cheese. I learned a lot about these names. There was a researcher, Mozzarella, Parmesan, Professor, Camembert, Brie. The students are very good at recognizing fake news. For example, when news about the war in Ukraine started appearing online. Finns in general have a very high standard of media literacy. We're not easily fooled. That's in part because media literacy is not a new concept for Finns. It's been part of the culture for more than a century, ever since the Nordic nation first gained independence from Russia in 1917. Almost a hundred years on, having walled itself off from years of Soviet propaganda, the fight against fake news is still being fought. First in the aftermath of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, and more recently with Putin's invasion of Ukraine. In particular, concerns about narratives challenging Finland's ambition to join NATO. And media literacy is now mandatory, a core component of the national curriculum. Teaching Finnish students to form a front line of defense against any disinformation, including content infiltrating the 830-mile-long border the two countries still share. During the period of Finlandization in the Cold War, the Finnish media were very cautious about their neighbor, the Soviet Union. People always had to ask themselves whether the news was really true. Of course, there have been changes since. Russia has taken on an increasingly aggressive global role. We're also spending an increasingly significant part of our lives on social media. So teaching media literacy and criticism in schools is so important. We were one of the first countries in the EU, probably in the world, to actually have a specific policy for media literacy. There's no one single right way to promote media literacy. There are multiple ways, and different organizations can do the work from their own viewpoints. That way we feel that we can reach much more people than we would be able to do if it was all done only by us, a governmental office producing only materials by the government and telling the official story. There's no escaping the multifaceted media education effort underway. So many different organizations are developing and delivering learning programs, from schools, universities and libraries to government departments and NGOs. And one of the biggest players is the public broadcaster Wiley. Mari Vesanumi is one of Wiley's media producers. She works on a number of the News Network's teaching tools, including a project called News Class. We have 14 different news mentors working from around Finland. They go and meet the class, they tell them who they are, and then they go through how news comes about, like what you see on the TV, how does that happen. And once you go through the whole process, they actually start thinking about these publication methods, and that is really the way fake news can be detected. Then, of course, Yle does a lot of other things. We have Wiley Learning, which does different types of video on media education, like the lie detector. The deepfake videos we produce have been really popular, and the reason why we put them out was that artificial intelligence is coming at a speed where we need to let people know that it exists and how it works. We also offer different types of games that you can immerse yourself into and think of what it would be like to be, for instance, a troll. Trolls, foxes, dogs. There's a whole menagerie of characters being deployed by game designers and developers to draw kids in. It's the more entertaining side of the educational toolkit, but that doesn't mean it's all just fun and games. Troll Factory is where you put yourself in the position of a troll and deliberately create as much harmful material as possible for online distribution. It's quite an unpleasant game, but students experience the harm of spreading misinformation, which is perhaps a good thing for them. Our job was to be internet trolls for a week, and we had to get as many followers and visibility as possible to our store, because we were spreading misinformation. We got a lot of followers, and spread a lot of unpleasant things. On the news here in Finland, it really makes you think, like, I do not want to be the lord of lies, which is the end result. When you think of kids who are gamers, if for some reason we manage to incorporate one media education game into their set of gaming, it's only a bonus. Playing to students' strengths, the Media Literacy Programme is a point of pride. One of the many international indexes where this small Nordic nation consistently comes out on top. Having spent the last century schooling its citizens to fend off fake news, Finland is shifting its focus, guarding against new trends, technologies and platforms to ensure that every pupil is prepared to fight false information, whatever form it might take. And don't forget to follow us on Twitter, does anyone really call it X? Facebook and Instagram for updates from the show. Links are in the description.