fuck yeah scandinavia

Fascinating through and through in particular:

“Once school starts, the Finns are more self-reliant. While some U.S. parents fuss over accompanying their children to and from school, and arrange every play date and outing, young Finns do much more on their own. At the Ymmersta School in a nearby Helsinki suburb, some first-grade students trudge to school through a stand of evergreens in near darkness. At lunch, they pick out their own meals, which all schools give free, and carry the trays to lunch tables. There is no Internet filter in the school library. They can walk in their socks during class, but at home even the very young are expected to lace up their own skates or put on their own skis.” Read more here.

The policy will be active in July 2010, when every Finn will get a one-megabit connection. But that’s just an intermediate step towards their final goal: By 2015, everyone will have a 100Mbps—yes, a hundred megabits per second—available.