Chèvre, camembert, chilled grapefruit, scallops in a creamy mustard sauce, raw carrot and red cabbage salad, lamb with saffron, baguette, water, and an hour to eat it and appreciate the sensation of each course while making polite conversation and practicing mealtime etiquette. This is school lunch in France. Not school lunch at an expensive, private, collegiate institution, but the average lunch served at a lower middle-class elementary school near Normandy. And according to the school’s chef, it costs less than the frozen and defrosted, congealed and coagulated, canned, sugar-saturated school lunches American children are served. A table of French ten-year-olds refuse a glass of Coke and are horrified to see images of American cafeteria food—saying, “Is that bread?” and “Seriously, what is that?” which elicited one schoolmate’s response of “a bizarre sauce.”
Or consider what Italians expect in terms of their vacations. The average Italian worker gets a minimum of seven weeks of vacation every year. Not including the 12 days of national holidays or the 15 days for a honeymoon or the five months of maternity (and paternity) leave or the days they didn’t use last year. And every one of those days is paid. In the US, the average employee gets ten days of paid time off, if they’re lucky. And on January 1st, if you haven’t cashed them in, they disappear. New mothers in America receive only two months’—unpaid—leave on average. Two gloriously tanned and smiling working-class Italians, Gianni and Christina Fancelli, are aghast at the news that most Americans don’t expect any paid vacation.
These are glimpses of what goes on in other countries, as provided by Michael Moore in his 2015 documentary Where to Invade Next?. These visions of an alternate life are startling and thought-provoking, but actually aren’t the reason you have to watch this film. Rather than complaining about our own failing systems in the U.S.—namely education, healthcare, tax, and law enforcement—or cornering and filming bad politicians or fanatical Americans, Moore travels to foreign countries (Tunisia, Finland, Italy, and others) to see what they are doing right. But I’m not dredging up a six-year-old documentary for no reason. This film is especially relevant now because of what it has to say about education. Moore “invades” foreign countries, claiming their ideas for America, and what he discovers is affirming, positive, generative, and includes exciting models for how we can counteract the current impoverishment of education in America. By that, I mean exponentially inflated college tuition costs, an epidemic of standardized tests (and our habit of “teaching to a test”), copious and stifling levels of homework, the rampant removal of books from curriculums, the reduction and simplification of content, the elimination of advanced learning options, and a pervasive lack of funding that makes teacher and student support near nonexistent.
In contrast, think of Finland (Moore’s third destination), which has held the top spot in global education rankings—the US, by comparison, is currently number 26. In Finnish schools, the concentration is on “finding what makes you happy,” because “there’s this very short time [people are] allowed to be children.” Finnish students don’t spend more than 10 minutes on homework a night, don’t have multiple-choice exams, aren’t taught to think in terms of tests, and have more time to be children and explore what they love—music, art, science, language, math, sports. “Your brain has to…relax every now and then. If you just constantly work, work, work, then you stop learning. And there’s no use of doing that for a longer period of time,” says a Finnish primary school teacher. This is why, Moore says, “Finland’s students have the shortest school days (3-4 hours) and the shortest school years in the entire Western world. They do better by going to school less.” And unlike in America, where “education is a business,” private schools don’t exist in Finland; in fact, it is illegal for a Finn to set up a school and charge tuition. Every school is as good as the other schools because “there is nothing different” in any of them.
In Slovenia, another one of Moore’s most exciting sojourns, you (yes, you, American!) can go to university for free and graduate completely without debt. For students in Slovenia, the concept of owing your school money for an education is entirely foreign. (For some perspective, many families pay an average of $10,000 a year or more to attend university in America.) An American student at the University of Ljubljana—which offers more than 100 programs in English—tells Moore that even international students can receive a free and quality education because “education [in Slovenia] is seen as something that’s really a public good and the issue is once you start charging foreign students for education, you automatically open up the idea that you can charge everyone. And as soon as anyone starts paying tuition, the entire idea of ‘free university for everyone’ is under threat.”
of free and high-quality services that aren’t provided
to the American taxpayer.
(Image courtesy of Michael Moore.)
twice over when they must take the costs of
healthcare, daycare, and tuition out of their income.
(Image courtesy of Michael Moore.)
In the most unexpected revelation of the film, Moore (prompted by his interviewees) divulges that many of these ideas originate in America—they are merely European variations on an American theme. A Finnish teacher tells Moore that “many of these things that have made Finland perform well in education are initially American ideas. We try to teach them to think for themselves and to be critical to what they’re learning. We try to teach them to be happy people, to respect others and respect yourself.” The film’s subjects suggest that in our desperation to make money and become “number one,” we just forgot to be curious. We became insular and unreceptive to the needs of our own citizens. We’ve set up systems that just aren’t working, yet we refuse to acknowledge our mistakes and actually make changes in the ways our institutions function.
In case you haven’t yet seen how incredibly relevant this film is to our current moment, take a look at Iceland (Moore’s final destination), an island nation that suffered acutely the financial crisis a dozen years ago. In 2008, the US housing bubble—wherein the housing sector exceeded its fundamental value by a large margin—burst and sent global economies into chaos. It was caused by the greedy and foolhardy buying and selling of subprime mortgages (mortgages that are unlikely to be paid) and the securities they backed for many years. This crisis crippled the American economy, but flattened Iceland—“Iceland’s collapse was the fastest in history, with 85 percent of the economy wiped out in weeks,” states Moore. Interestingly, “there was only one financial institution, Audur Capital, in Iceland, that did not lose money for its customers. It was founded by two women on the investment principle of “if we don’t understand it, we’re not buying it.” This is yet another reason to watch the film.
Moore’s interview with several of these female financial CEOs and their role as women in Iceland’s banking system is illuminating and empowering. One of the women says in a message to the American people, “Every kid should have the same opportunity… The basic opportunity to get education and health care. It’s not Communism, it’s just a good society. You [Americans] play more solo. ‘I’m taking care of myself and my family and the rest, I don’t care about.’ But we are more like a big group and we try to take care of each other within that group.” Surprisingly, the Icelanders’ successful prosecution of their “financial bad boys” was actually modelled after the American legal proceedings in our savings and loan scandal, says a Icelandic prosecutor who worked closely with American lawyers on many criminal charges against those responsible for the market crash.
Then, when the pandemic started a year ago, Iceland’s COVID-19 response was hugely proactive and science-based. Partnering with the Icelandic genetics company deCODE, the government and healthcare force started to implement isolation, quarantine, and contact tracing measures in the beginning of January and testing residents in early February of 2020—more than two months before the U.S. shut down and four months before testing began. The health of every SARS-COV-2 positive patient is tracked in Iceland. They are isolated for 14 days in an outpatient clinic. Their symptoms are documented and added to a comprehensive list of symptoms, of which fever isn’t one. (News flash: Americans’ insistence on checking for fever—because we are desperate for measurable symptoms and reassurance—makes us look outdated and ridiculous. And because they did genomic testing on everyone who tested positive, Iceland has been able to offer the world one of our most startling statistics about COVID—almost half of infected people are asymptomatic.) Over 55 percent of the country’s residents have been screened. Iceland has recorded only seven deaths per 100,000 (for a country of 359,000 residents). The U.S. is averaging 80 deaths per 100,000 people, with a population of 328 million. Here’s the kicker: all the scientific methods Iceland has used for testing, tracking, isolating strains, and sequencing genetic material were developed in America, says Kári Stefánsson, CEO of deCODE. Stefánsson maintains that “the same approach could work” in the US if not for “regulatory and administrative obstacles” faced by labs and “a lack of federal leadership.”
One of the most compelling arguments made in the film is by a Tunisian journalist named Amel Smaoui. She was working in the media at the time of the 2011 revolution in Tunisia during which a massive popular uprising forced the conservative government to add women’s rights to the new constitution (the Equal Rights Amendment has yet to be ratified in the United States). Moore asks her if she would like to say something to Americans. Here is what she said:
Americans are lucky they belong to the most powerful country in the world. But being the strongest one maybe stops them from being just curious. I know a lot about you guys. I know your music from the 70’s until today—I danced to your music. I speak (as much as I can) your language. I know Henry Miller, Kerouac, F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wear your clothes, I eat your food, but I also have my culture. What do you know about my culture or Estonian culture or Zimbabwean culture? I read an interesting article about the average time Americans spend watching the Kardashians’ show. Why do you spend your time on this? You invented the most powerful weapon in the world. It’s internet, guys—use it the right way. Check, read, watch, and then come to visit us. It’s a little small country, her name is Tunisia, it’s in North Africa. And I really think we deserve (as much as the other countries) your attention. If you keep this way of thinking that you are the best and you know everything, it won’t work.