In art class, kids can learn about loops by knitting, which is, after all, a sequence of stitches that sometimes vary and sometimes stay the same. Kids who are enchanted by stories can be introduced through storytelling to the foundational idea that specific outcomes require particular instructions in a particular order. In one of the Ruby stories, Ruby’s dad tells the redheaded youngster to get dressed. So Ruby does—by putting her clothes on over her pajamas. Only when he specifies that she should take off her pajamas and put on fresh day clothes does Ruby’s father get the result he was looking for: a properly attired Ruby ready to face the day.

Liukas pushes back at the idea that children are already tech-savvy simply because they seem to be able to navigate an iPhone intuitively. She’s particularly fond of this quote from the American computing professor Mark Guzdial:

We want students to understand what a computer can do, what a human can do, and why that’s different. To understand computing is to have a robust mental model of a notional machine.

In other words, knowing how to use something isn’t the same as understanding how it works. And because programming can be taught in so many ways, Liukas said, it can be an opportunity for kids to learn lots of related skills, such as how to collaborate, how to tell a story, and how to think creatively.

“This demands a lot from the teachers, obviously,” Liukas said during a presentation at the embassy event. This is true in the sense that incorporating coding and programming lessons across disciplines requires all kinds of educators, from the science teacher to the art teacher, to understand the basics. But it’s also a manageable challenge in Finland because teachers there have more autonomy than American teachers when it comes to how and what they teach, and they aren’t constantly evaluated by how their students score on standardized tests.

This is where the argument that it’s supposedly not fair to compare Finland to the United States because the former is much smaller, more homogenous, and more egalitarian often comes in. But Samuel Abrams, a professor at Columbia University and the author of a book about the push to privatize education in the United States, challenges that narrative. Abrams, who outlined his research at the embassy, compared Finland’s high marks on international education tests to those produced by other, similarly sized Nordic countries that are also relatively more homogenous and egalitarian than the United States. Those countries—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—score lower than Finland and more in line with America.

Finland, Abrams argued, sees education as a mode of nation building and economic development because it has to. While Norway has oil and Sweden has minerals and Denmark has banking, Finland has the brains of its citizens. And while Finland is today considered a frontrunner on education, that wasn’t always the case. The country was hit hard by World War II and focused in part on bolstering its education system to rebound, implementing a series of reforms in the 1970s. By 1979, teachers needed a master’s degree. Today, class sizes are small, teachers are paid well compared to their college classmates who study other disciplines, and the country only opens as many teacher training spaces as it needs, meaning fewer than 10 percent of those who want to teach are accepted. Crucially, teachers are trained, Abrams said, to be “a guide on the side as opposed to a sage on the stage.”