The Fire We Forgot to Look For: What Finland, Sweden, and a Chance Conversation with Pasi Solberg Taught Me About Teaching
This article and podcast explore the human-centered educational philosophies of Sweden and Finland, contrasting them with the bureaucratic, data-driven systems often found in the United States. Central to the discussion is Sweden’s narrative-based growth model, which prioritizes a child’s social-emotional security and mastery over rigid labels or standardized testing scores. The texts emphasize that successful schooling relies on trusting teacher professionalism and honoring the personal passions educators bring to the classroom. By reducing the burden of complex administrative frameworks and "alphabet soup" acronyms, these Nordic models aim to preserve the "fire" of curiosity in both students and instructors. Ultimately, the author argues that authentic learning occurs when the system recognizes the whole person rather than treating students like data points on a spreadsheet.
The Fire and the Framework: Lessons from Nordic Education PRESENTATION SLIDE DECK
A few years ago I found myself sharing a few days at an education conference with Pasi Sahlberg — the Finnish educator, author of Finnish Lessons, who was on tour with the book at the time. He wasn't traveling alone. He'd brought finished teachers with him, and someone who held a title we'd translate as "superintendent" but who bore almost no resemblance to what that word means here. No vast bureaucratic office. No army of compliance officers. No data dashboard humming in the background, tracking every child like inventory.
We got to talking about how Finland brings new teachers into the profession — how they're selected before they ever set foot in a teaching college. Sahlberg told a story about a family member who wanted to become an educator, and he laid out the three things Finland looks for before they'll even let a candidate in the door. First: are they at the top of their class academically? Second — and this is the one that stopped me — do they have an incredible fire and passion for education? And third: what, in their own life, are they passionate about?
That third question sat with me for a long time. Because it isn't really a question about teaching credentials at all. It's a question about the whole human being standing in front of the classroom.
Building a Fire, Not Filling a Bucket
Here's the idea I walked away with: teaching is about lighting a fire in children. Sometimes it's building a fire — you're placing wood near the flame, close enough that it might catch. Sometimes it catches right away. Sometimes it takes years. Sometimes, honestly, it never catches at all, and you have to be at peace with that too. But the systems that produce great teachers understand something we've forgotten: you cannot be a teacher without fire and passion, because if the fire isn't in you, there is nothing to hand to a child. You cannot give away what you do not have.
If a teacher is in love with playing the flute, that passion translates to the child sitting in front of her. If a teacher lives for dance, that transfers. If a teacher is an artist — and I say this as someone whose own path into education ran directly through watercolor and pen-and-ink, through years spent painting my way across 27 countries in Europe — that fire is not separate from the teaching. It is the teaching. Curiosity is contagious. So is its absence.
What We Built Instead
The American education system is top-down. It has calcified into a giant bureaucracy — data walls, data dashboards, testing regimes, accountability frameworks stacked on top of each other until the actual child underneath is nearly impossible to see. We've built an entire alphabet soup to manage this: RTI, MTSS, Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3, EdTech integration platforms, special education compliance timelines. Endless acronyms. Endless testing. Endless data walls.
And still our kids don't want to go to school. They're opting out. They're burning out. Behaviors are rising. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. We keep asking why education is broken, and the honest answer is uncomfortable: we took the one thing Finland — and Sweden, where I did my own graduate studies — has never let go of, and we threw it away. You have to trust your teachers. You have to revere them. You have to give them the room to use their intellect, their training, their judgment, to be fully who they are in the room with children. Instead, we built a system engineered to remove exactly that.
RTI, MTSS, Child Find, IEP compliance timelines, resource pull-out models, every branded reading intervention from Orton-Gillingham to Wilson — none of it is worthless. I've built my own career, and Reading Boot Camp itself, on structured literacy and Orton-Gillingham principles. But all of it turns to dust when the system around it refuses to recognize the whole child, and refuses to recognize the teacher as a trusted, competent human being empowered to make her own decisions in real time, for the real child in front of her.
What Sweden Showed Me
This is where my own story picks up the thread. Long before I had language for any of this, I was a dyslexic kid who found an unexpected gift for drawing. That gift eventually funded graduate study abroad in Uppsala, Sweden — and it was there, watching Swedish classrooms up close, that I first saw a mastery-based system that refuses to label children the way we do.
Sweden's tool is called the individuell utvecklingsplan — the IUP. It began life as something close to a narrative report card, and over time it was codified around standards and competencies, but it never lost its essential simplicity: is the child competent? Are they growing toward proficiency? Do they feel secure in their own knowledge? The child knows. The parent knows. The teacher knows. No data wall required.
That's not a soft, fuzzy alternative to rigor — it's rigor pointed at the right target. It's the same instinct I've carried through 26 years in special education and Title I classrooms: that a child's growth is a whole-person story, academic and social-emotional and executive-functioning all at once, not a single test score dropped into a spreadsheet cell.
The System Won't Save Us. The Teacher Has To.
Here's what the testing-and-accountability era got backwards, and what Finland — and Sweden — never forgot: you can build the best MTSS framework in the country. You can have the most sophisticated RTI tiers, the sharpest EdTech platform, an administration that checks every box correctly. On paper, it should work.
It won't.
Because if the children in front of that system don't see passion, don't see curiosity, don't see fire in the adult standing at the front of the room, they will not catch fire themselves. They will not be inspired by a framework. They will see, correctly, that the system is broken — because the teacher inside it has been asked to be broken too: compliant, monitored, stripped of the very fire that made her want to teach in the first place.
If we want to fix American education, the place to start isn't another acronym. It's remembering what Finland and Sweden never let themselves forget — that you build fire in children by trusting the fire already burning in their teachers.
Sean Taylor is a special education teacher, curriculum developer, and founder of Reading Boot Camp. He writes about literacy, structured reading intervention, and international approaches to whole-child education at Reading Sage.
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