HELSINGIN SANOMAT international

“No more Latin, no more French...

By William Moore
Photos: Jarmo Matilainen / HS, Annica Moore

...no more sitting on the old school bench.” Strange, the way these childhood rhymes come back to one. Perhaps they don't sing that sort of thing anymore. At least if they do, it's in a rap version and the lyrics are unprintable, but it's the bench that is the key here. The second or third week in February each year provides casual visitors to Finland (though who would casually visit Finland in February?) with a Thursday morning spectacle that might make them wonder about all those guide-book entries that describe the Finns as dour, taciturn, and, well... plain dull.
Large snowflakes did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm.
Large snowflakes did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm.
   Under a leaden sky, the slushy streets of Helsinki are suddenly filled with open trucks, dozens of them in column, each bearing a score of hormone- and alcohol-fuelled girls and boys in their late teens wearing strange white overalls spray-painted with slogans, radioactive warning signs, and the like. The trucks themselves, until yesterday employed carrying gravel or other inanimate cargo, are covered on their side and rear panels with large signs and slogans in Finnish - and this year many of them seem to be 10-ton mobile shrines to the memory of the much-killed Kenny of South Park. The noise is deafening. The kids are screaming and shouting and blowing horns, the pavements are lined with people apparently applauding this mayhem, and the air is filled with flying sweets and candies. Just WHAT is going on here?
   The annual event is connected, believe it or not, with a more sober Finnish fascination - education. The hundreds of 18- and 19-year-olds have just completed their schooling (yes, in February), and will now retire to homes and libraries to revise frantically for the matriculation exams that will guarantee them at least a shot at a place in university or some other form of further education. The event is known here as penkkarit, or penkinpainajaiset, and it loosely translates as “putting up the benches” - the end of attendance at classes.
   Briefly, Finland's school system consists of nine years of compulsory education in primary and secondary schools to the age of 15-16, followed by a three-year stint leading to national examinations that determine whether the student will be able to wear a white cap - the mark of graduation. The securing of this white cap is still an important rite of passage, and all aspects of the getting of it are taken equally seriously. Riotous penkkarit celebrations are part of the ritual.
   In fact, the process is a rather longer one; it does not extend merely from February, on through the exams in mid-March, and to the award of the cap at the end of May when the schools break up for the summer holidays. Just as with the interminable election campaigns in the United States, we have to go some way into the past to find the beginnings of the action. It is probably best to trek backwards a whole year to the previous penkkarit. At this point, since one year's worth of kids leave the school community, those a year younger than them become the oldest in the school. This begins their glide-path to the exams and freedom - or freedom to study some more and join the lines for university entry.
   These new “oldest” celebrate their promotion to most-senior status with a party, at which they dress up in tails and long dresses and dance waltzes, gavottes, quadrilles, pot-pourris, Schottisches, polkas, foxtrots, rumbas, and probably one '70s Travolta disco number for a laugh, in front of an adoring invited audience of parents and teachers. They train for weeks for the event, and peer-pressure is such that even those with dreadlocks or a taste for death-metal or ambient funk join in and trip the light fantastic and do round dances like “The Dashing White Sergeant” as if they were born to it. Knowing that afterwards they will almost certainly be going out to get legless in a Helsinki techno-club only adds to the slightly surreal aspect of the whole affair.
The future starts here, a trifle unsteadily...
The future starts here, a trifle unsteadily...
   Anyway, these kids now rule the roost in school. They are a couple of months away from the end of the school year, and six months from the beginning of a new one in which they will become what is known as Abis - after the German word abiturient, for a pupil leaving school. The final year of school is a mixture of completing courses to satisfy school graduation requirements, taking one or two final exams early in October to lessen the burden of the following spring, a gradual coming-together in adversity and the building of group solidarity, and a succession of parties to celebrate important milestones. The “100-days bash” is one, followed as often as not a month later by a celebration of the mysteries of the number 69, followed by yet more frenzied celebrations at 30 days.
   Then we are into February, and the days are down to single figures. First comes work, with the listening comprehension exams in Swedish (or Finnish in Swedish-speaking schools) and a range of foreign languages. These exams are held separately from the other written papers, which will follow in March. The listening comprehension exams are an ordeal by headphones, in which almost without exception the students grumble that the English paper was impossible because the examining board AGAIN picked a reader with an awful lisp or someone from some obscure West Indian island whose speech was only recognisable to reggae and ska enthusiasts.
   On the second or third Wednesday, the next crop of newly-created oldest, having barely recovered from their ballroom dancing and celebrating, gather to “kick out” the Abis from school in a celebration known as potkiaiset. Thereafter, school's out for the Abis.
   Early on the Thursday morning the Abis come to the place as pupils one last time, probably somewhat hung over, and the day begins with a kind of “Feast of Fools” charade at which the roles are reversed and they serve as teachers, ordering the younger ones around. Then they put on a cabaret show for the staff, at which they mercilessly expose the follies of their teachers. This is one of those occasions where NOT to be the subject of satire is a sign that you have failed to make much impact on your pupils, so everyone laughs good-naturedly, and there are hugs and a few tears, but the teachers know it's not really quite “goodbye” yet.
   Then it's “start your engines” time and everyone clambers onto the decorated trucks parked in the school yard, and they all drive off to a rowdy congregation point in a large car-park before heading through the main streets of town, tossing candy to passers-by and the large contingents of kindergarten children who come out to watch what it is they will be doing fifteen years' hence.
Trucks ready to move off in Espoo.
Trucks ready to move off in Espoo.
   It's all over by lunchtime, but inevitably things segue into parties and gatherings in local watering-holes that go late into the night. Some classes will have been more organised and will have arranged cruises to Sweden or Estonia so that the Abis can party down to the background noise of ice cracking in their glasses and outside the hull of the ship. A “Miss Abi” may even be crowned, but modelling contracts are unlikely to follow, and the chances are that the only rewards of the evening for most will be a headache.
   And then, after a reasonable recovery period, the serious cramming starts for the exams, and parents bite their nails and remember how it was much tougher in THEIR day, and you had to pass everything at once or you got nothing, and the kids themselves either get panic-stricken (if their parents work them up enough) or calmly get down to work for a month.
   The exams take place under strict supervision at the school. Last year there was a whiff of cheating involving the use of mobile phones and short text messages, so Nokias and Ericssons are removed at the door and one ingenious IT teacher designed a cellphone detector that flashes and beeps when one is used in the immediate vicinity.
   The papers are marked internally and then sent for a second assessment by an external board. This makes for some disappointments and semi-scandals every year as a teacher who knows the pupil's laconic style may grade a daring essay “L” (for Laudatur), only for the pupil to see it come back from the underwhelmed external marker as a rather less-exalted “M” (for Magna cum laude), or even a “C” for a pretty average Cum laude. If the drop in the grading is sufficiently large, there is scope for protests, and there are always one or two.
   The Finns are a very education-conscious nation even today, and a score of six laudaturs or better on the matriculation exams is a source of great family pride. It also smooths the way towards university entrance, though in the most competitive subjects it still does not guarantee acceptance without taking entrance exams.
   After the matriculation exams are done, the ex-Abis are free until the end of May, when they return to the school for the award of their certificates and their white caps, assuming they have satisfied the examiners enough to get a cap. Everyone dresses in their best, the parents show up, fathers take videos and mothers sniffle, scholarships are handed out, and everybody sings a closing anthem to ring down the curtain on the school year - and for one intake of around 30,000, the entire school career. It's an emotional moment.
   Graduation parties follow at home, with the new cap-holder plied with gifts, champagne, roses, and the inevitable Auntie remarks about how he or she has grown. The school certificate and the examination certificate are passed around and the Laudaturs are noted with approving nods. Following christening and confirmation, this is the third big rite of passage in a Finnish child's life, and it far surpasses the business of turning eighteen, let alone things like the “21st Birthday”, which is dismissed with a card.
   The party is as much an occasion for parents to invite their friends round for drinks and snacks, and for the youth being celebrated it is sometimes a slightly solitary (though very profitable) business, as all his or her friends are occupied at their own similar gatherings. As soon as is allowed by etiquette, the new and suddenly much richer cap-holder makes his exit to yet another party, often a mass affair in a downtown restaurant.
   For high school graduates in Helsinki and environs, the evening often ends up in Hietaniemi at a pre-dawn beach rave-up, at which point - as the excitement and the champagne begin to wear off - the youngsters have to start thinking about what happens next. For the boys, as often as not, the next step is six months to a year of military service. And that seems to many like a return to school, even if it is a whole different ball-game.
   Perhaps the truth is that the benches just change shape and never really get put up, after all. But it certainly brightens up our February.
Helsingin Sanomat / International Edition 22.2.2000