I’ll just quote some of them here. They are verbatim: 60% of Finnish adults are English-literate. Read these. Take some time to ponder them. Chew on them.

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The need and desire of students for life-long learning must be reinforced.

Cooperation, interaction and communication skills must be developed by means of different forms of collaborative learning.

Upper secondary schools must develop students’ abilities to recognize and deal with ethical issues involving communities and individuals.

Education must help students recognize their personal uniqueness.

Education must stimulate students to engage in artistic activities, to participate in artistic and cultural life, and to adopt lifestyles that promote health and well-being.

Students will be capable of facing the challenges presented by the changing world in a flexible manner, be familiar with means of influence, and possess the will and courage to take action.

An upper secondary school community must create prerequisites for experiencing inclusion, reciprocal support and justice. These are important sources of joy in life.

Human beings must learn how to adapt to the conditions of nature and the limits set by global sustainability.

Upper secondary schools must reinforce students’ positive cultural identity and knowledge of cultures.

Technology is based on knowledge of the laws of nature.

Students will observe and critically analyze the relationship between the world as described by media, and reality.

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I feel as if I have been handed something which, in this climate of national standards development, needs to be on Arne Duncan’s desk tomorrow, and I’m going to be messing around with my blog and personal contacts to see how far I can get with this ridiculous and lofty goal. Suggestions, comments, forwards, and general publicity from readers would be most welcome.

The whole Finnish document can be found here.

I think I might be waiting for a spring breeze. And just what I mean by that, I am still figuring out.

For example, you can’t argue with me about the iPhone’s appeal to the naturalist, because I agree. Peterson’s Guide to North American Birds smaller than your hand? Identify constellations from the photo lens? I know. With so many places it could slip unobtrusively into my backcountry pack, it’s hard to contain the drool.

And yet, and yet. Isn’t there a time when even bringing a book along on a hike– much less a book on crack like the iPhone– actually draws your attention away from…simple…observing?  From simple, visceral experience? The cataloging, the identifying, the compartmentalizing, the defining; doesn’t the din of the mind move us away, at last, and maybe permanently, from the fundamental reality of our senses? When I rush to pin my virtual map up against the stars, doesn’t it, in the end, block them out?

Schooling comes into this in several ways. One (and again): an uncritical love affair with technology does nothing for our students. If we do not give them the tools to see that every gain we make with technology takes something else away– something we may need very badly– then we leave them mired in the worship of what Neil Postman called “the god of technology,” a Faustian bargain at best:

Ask anyone who knows something about computers to talk about them, and you will find that they will, unabashedly and relentlessly, extol the wonders of computers. You will also find that in most cases they will completely neglect to mention any of the liabilities of computers. This is a dangerous imbalance, since the greater the wonders of a technology, the greater will be its negative consequences…

Perhaps the best way I can express this idea is to say that the question, “What will a new technology do?” is no more important than the question, “What will a new technology undo?” Indeed, the latter question is more important, precisely because it is asked so infrequently.

Ask it, friends. As educators, we must ask it.

(This quote  from what should be required reading for every educator, Postman’s mind-blowing lecture “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” )

Second, we must recognize that school, in its very essence, also moves us inexorably away from visceral experience. Simply by placing a premium on reading and writing, it does so. This is not my thesis– that honor belongs to David Abram– but it is my belief, confirmed in experience, and it bugs me more and more with each passing day. Yes, this is the English teacher talking.

Yet hopelessly and irrevocably in love with words, I actually wonder if this doesn’t put me in the correct place to criticize their overuse. For if our education becomes a serpent biting its own tail– reading and writing about, well, reading and writing– then what are we actually reading and writing about? What are we really learning?

The whole thing seems to crumble, like a coal self-consumed; one push with a stick, and the ash collapses and blows away.

This is a lot to pile on the poor little iPhone, and you’ll note that I’m not actually placing the fate of the world on its delicate silver shoulders; that, too, would be overestimating its importance.

But there’s that spring breeze, though, moving through the room, or my daughter’s laugh. Hip-deep in apps, I may easily miss them both.

And it just gets easier and easier, doesn’t it.

I’m deeply aware– some might say obsessively so– about the moral dimension of teaching. Far more than irregular verbs or how to construct an engaging summative paragraph, I work to teach my students how literature can help ask and answer the questions that make living meaningful. And then I kind of kill myself trying to model such living in my own behavior, with varying degrees of success.

Why? Middle school kids notice. In fact, they have an eagle eye for justice that many adults lose. They notice when I slough something off, break a promise, or unintentionally flout my own rules, and have no compunction about calling me out. Some teachers call this disrespect, but I encourage and treasure it. The kids keep me sane and honest, especially when I feel the habit of rigor that they inspire, spilling– necessarily, I believe– into extracurricular areas. Ultimately, I can never forget that my integrity may be the only promise of consistency that some of these kids see. (Thanks, Kant. Some days I wish I never met you.)

So in this spirit, I committed personally to a strict adherence to contract regarding my paid leave use. This depleted my bank of personal days, while leaving a substantial bank of sick days untouched– and unusable for family emergencies. Imagine, then, my reaction yesterday to the fallout from the fact that I had to take nearly four days of unpaid leave in order to be with my dying parent.

(For you rule-mongers out there, The National Family Leave Act only legislates unpaid leave; and in my district, sick time may not be used in its place.)

I don’t publicize this as some kind of “how great I am” moment, or a snotty revenge against my HR department. I hold no grudges there; they’re just doing their jobs. Nor do I mean to whine about the lost money, although this is undeniably part of the steep price I am paying now.

Rather I remain reeling– as usual– in the moral realm; stunned at the message of a system that punishes me– never mind the folks not as luckily endowed with benefits– so swiftly and concretely, for doing the right thing.

And the first thing I wonder is, “How am I going to prepare my students for this inevitable disappointment? How will I ever begin to help them understand?” Because for some of them, an experience like this has the potential to knock them clean out of principled living forever, and make no mistake.

Anyone have some suggestions for pre-teen fiction where the protagonist is left at the end with only the satisfaction of a clear conscience?

“What is honesty worth?” my students ask. They ask this, explicitly and implicitly, every day. My answer today is tangible, secret, and unsatisfactory. It is not the touching and uselessly ephemeral Mastercard sentiment: “It’s priceless.” Today, honesty is worth a tired teacher, some tears, and eight hundred and thirty-nine dollars.

“Can we write about the dumpster?” says my posse of three boys. I agree under the condition that they don’t go in the dumpster, which they concede grudgingly; I leave them bending in half over the edges, flashing their boxers, writing on their clipboards and saying things like “Is that a RAT?”

Another boy approaches me. “Are these trees dead?” he asks, in the annoyed tone of seventh grade boys that indicates the presence of a genuine inquiry.

“See those buds?” I point out. “They look dead, but in a few weeks these trees will be covered in leaves.”

The next fifteen minutes are peppered with further wondrous questions:

“Can you smell mud?”

“I heard a train whistle. How could I hear that? There’s no tracks near here.”

“I licked a tree. It tastes like butter.”

“It does not.”

A swarm of students attempt to prove the tree-licker wrong. While I’m simultaneously laughing and hoping desperately that my principal is not looking out her office window, I hear the dull thud of a semi-inflated ball being kicked around. The posse has obeyed the letter of my law, but not the spirit.

“Can I keep this?” one of them shouts joyfully. He pops the dirty, half-dead tetherball into the air with his knee; I remember that the basketball coach has said that he drops baskets with total command. Then my Iraqi student takes over, and we have a demonstration of a different kind of grace. He’s told me that streetball and soccer helped his spirit survive as a refugee in Syria.

The class’ concentration is shot now, so we sneak back into the building along with the tetherball. As they add details to their sensory charts back at their desks, we talk about birdsong; I pull up a recording of a red-winged blackbird– they’re all over the marshy hollows that surround the school.

“OH,” several shout, “I’ve heard that.”

A student turns in his seat, sporting a demeaning arch of his eyebrow. He is an inveterate talker in my class, but he spends hours outside every day on his grandfather’s property. “Who HASN’T heard that??” he demands.

At the bell, as the kids file out, I stop Tetherball Boy. “I want a kick-butt poem about that ball,” I say.

“For extra credit?” he says eagerly, forgetting altogether about bragging to his friend within my earshot this morning about his stupidly low average.

“Done,” I tell him.

“All right,” he rejoices. He shoots off to his next class, laying plans with his buddies to paint the tetherball red and silver when they get home.