Satire · first published 2023-12-08
What the Independence Day ball costs, explaining the PISA fall, and a case for being ordinary | Weekly Wiseguys, 8 December 2023
Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo's Weekly Wiseguys, 8 December 2023, two days after Finland's Independence Day ball and three days after the PISA results. It opens on what the ball costs — and the panel, which sells "taxation is theft" T-shirts, ends up defending it. The main section is the PISA fall: incentives, inclusion, holding pupils back a year, two decades of rising per-pupil spending and the language question. It closes somewhere unexpected, with a case for an ordinary life.
What the Independence Day ball costs, explaining the PISA fall, and a case for being ordinary | Weekly Wiseguys, 8 December 2023
Summary: Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and MP Onni Rostila on Ivan Puopolo’s Weekly Wiseguys, 8 December 2023, two days after Finland’s Independence Day ball and three days after the PISA results. It opens on what the ball costs — and the panel, which sells “taxation is theft” T-shirts, ends up defending it. The main section is the PISA fall: incentives, inclusion, holding pupils back a year, two decades of rising per-pupil spending and the language question. It closes somewhere unexpected, with a case for an ordinary life.
This is a summary on Neuvottelija AI. The episode itself is on Ivan Puopolo’s channel and is his — watch the original. The appearance is catalogued at neuvottelija.com/media, which is the canonical home of this content.
A note on reading this. Weekly Wiseguys is a tongue-in-cheek political panel, not a news broadcast. The speakers are right-of-centre commentators and politicians talking in their own names, sharpening for effect and joking as they go. This article sorts their arguments and marks who said what; it takes no position on who is right, and it does not reproduce the personal jabs. Speakers are named only where the recording itself identifies who is talking: the transcript carries no speaker labels, so uncertain passages are attributed to the panel or to “one of the guests” rather than to a name. The opinions are the speakers’ own.
The panel
Ivan Puopolo hosts; the guests are Sami Miettinen, Tere Sammallahti and Finns Party MP Onni Rostila — what the panel calls its “classic line-up”. Recorded on Friday 8 December 2023: two days after the presidential Independence Day ball, three days after the PISA results.
Three sections, the last of which the title does not prepare you for.
1. The Independence Day ball — and a panel that ends up defending it
The starting point is the programme’s standing position: a party paid for out of taxes is waste by default. The panel literally sells “taxation is theft” T-shirts.
And then it does the most surprising thing in the episode: it checks the number, and checking the number changes the argument.
One guest guesses €300,000. Another supplies the verified figure: the 2023 ball had a budget of €275,000, the highest of Sauli Niinistö’s presidency — the previous record, €263,000, was in 2013. After that the argument changes, because the scale is known.
The defence comes from three directions, and they are not the same argument:
- Onni Rostila argues from ritual and tradition: a shared national experience is a value in itself, and Finland has few occasions that produce one.
- Another guest says he is on the fence: the ball could be done for less, but he does not dispute the value of the tradition. He also notes that the guest list includes ordinary people, small business owners and pensioners, not only an elite.
- The cultural argument: the ball is in practice the only occasion on which Finns wear formal dress, and it keeps alive a custom that would otherwise disappear.
Those who were there also report the warmest observation in the episode: in that hall you shake hands and wish a happy Independence Day even to the people you cross swords with the rest of the year. Two left-wing politicians are named as examples of exactly that.
The section leaves one concrete proposal: a second ball the next day, for ordinary citizens — the people who vote and never appear anywhere.
2. PISA — five explanations, and what they explain
The PISA results had just come out. The panel’s treatment is the weightiest part of the episode, and it is best read as a sorting of explanations rather than as a position.
Explanation 1: incentives
A structural argument that targets nobody personally: an administration’s incentive is not to make classrooms work but to look good to its peers. That is why the publicly repeated explanation is the socially safe one. The argument is general and applies to any organisation, including ones the panel favours.
Explanation 2: resources have not fallen
The panel’s figure: spending per pupil was around €4,600 two decades ago and is now over €10,000. The conclusion: more resources cannot be the whole answer, because resources have already risen while results fell.
One caveat needs adding, and the panel does not add it: these are nominal figures. Prices have risen substantially over twenty years, so the real increase is considerably less than a doubling. The direction of the argument survives — real spending per pupil has gone up — but it carries less force than the number suggests.
Explanation 3: inclusion and ability grouping
The most delicate passage, because the panel is not unanimous and does not pretend to be.
One guest says plainly that the idea of inclusion is a beautiful one and works up to a point, but argues that many classrooms have passed what a single teacher’s pedagogical training and time can cover. Another goes further and treats inclusion as a mistake in principle.
For ability grouping they offer a motivation argument: a gap of the right size relative to one’s own level drives better performance. The claim is made with a gesture at research, but no source is named.
The counter-argument — that ability grouping locks the weakest pupils in place — is not addressed. That is the clearest gap in the section.
The panel also mentions a teacher who had publicly criticised the direction of travel years earlier and was heavily attacked for it. The case is not verified here.
Explanation 4: holding pupils back
The claim is that progression criteria are no longer enforced, and that this harms most the pupils whose foundations are weakest. The panel puts it in a way worth quoting, because it inverts the expected framing: the pupil is passed up a year, and thereby set up to fail.
Explanation 5: language
The most contested and also the most precise part of the section. The panel’s claim is that among the variables explaining the PISA fall, the change in the pupil population goes unmentioned in public debate even though it shows in the data. They point to first- and second-generation pupils of immigrant background performing, on average, considerably worse. That is a checkable claim, and its direction matches what PISA reporting shows — the gap in Finland is large by international comparison.
What matters is where the panel takes the explanation. They do not take it to ethnicity. One guest says plainly: “I don’t think it’s about ethnic background so much as about the language.” From which follow three proposals:
- Invest in Finnish-as-a-second-language teaching, rather than switching to English.
- Use translation tools in public services, so a family can get things done while the language is being learned.
- Selectivity in immigration affects the next generation. The claim is broader than immigration: children of highly educated parents do better at school on average, whatever country the family comes from.
The proposal of a language test as a condition of entry to a given school is thrown out and not developed. It is the furthest-reaching idea in the episode, and its obvious problems — compulsory education, equal treatment, the fact that a child does not choose their language skills — go unaddressed.
Where the panel leans on anecdote
Several individual observations are brought into the language section: Sami Miettinen recounts a discussion about the construction trade from his own podcast, in which language skills separated one work crew from another; alongside it come observations about a schoolyard, clips from social media, and individual cases.
Of these the construction-trade observation is the least weak, because its source is stated. The rest are anecdotes, and the panel generalises from them. The claim about the importance of language skills in hiring may be true — but these observations do not establish it, and the episode demands elsewhere exactly what it does not supply here.
The panel does make one distinction worth marking on the same subject: in hiring, criteria should be clear and applied consistently; in everyday life, second-language speakers should be encouraged to use the language, because that is the only way it is learned. That is a constructive position and it is said out loud.
3. A case for being ordinary
The episode ends somewhere entirely different from where it started, and this is its best part.
Ivan Puopolo addresses young viewers directly: it is fine to be ordinary. His observation is that public conversation revolves around an assumption that everyone should be a graduate and reach a certain income — and that being middle-of-the-road is in fact one of the best places to stand: things go well for you, you are not in the spotlight, and nobody tries to destroy you in public.
Onni Rostila continues from his own experience: what he does in parliament is secondary to the fact that only he can be his children’s parent.
And then comes the objection that saves the section from sentimentality. One guest points out that the experience is unique to the person having it, but not otherwise: having children and starting a family are remarkably alike across people — and that is precisely the argument for it. If you don’t know whether it is your thing, the evidence is that it has been billions of people’s thing.
With it comes the observation from the episode that is easiest to carry away: a picture in which nothing bad ever happens to anyone is an illusion — and one “things have been hard lately” post a year does not fix it.
Claims presented as claims
- The research gesture about the motivational effect of ability grouping (no source named).
- The case of the teacher attacked for public criticism.
- The individual anecdotes about language at school and at work.
- Assessments of how deliberately one politician’s public image is managed — the panel disagrees with itself here, and the disagreement is left open.
- Per-pupil spending is given in nominal terms, without adjusting for inflation.
What survives the episode
- Checking the number changes the argument. The panel guesses the cost of the ball wrong, checks it, and shifts position live on air.
- There are several explanations and they are worth sorting. Five are offered for the PISA fall rather than one culprit — and the language question is taken explicitly to language rather than to background.
- It is fine to be ordinary. Nobody presents that as a political claim — which may be why it stays with you.
How the episode runs
- 00:00 — Greetings from the slope
- 03:13 — The line-up and the Independence Day special
- 04:06 — “Observers at the ball”
- 04:53 — What the ball costs — the guess and the figure
- 05:41 — Formal dress as culture
- 06:27 — €275,000, and how it compares
- 07:17 — Who gets invited
- 08:05 — A tradition few countries have
- 08:53 — Does it look like fun on television?
- 09:52 — What it felt like in the room
- 10:40 — Political opponents in the same room
- 11:40 — A proposal: a second ball for ordinary citizens
- 12:27 — The shortage of places to go on to
- 13:18 — The attention economy and the media game
- 14:12 — A disagreement: is any of it planned?
- 15:47 — What “shaking things up” means in practice
- 16:35 — Image as work
- 17:22 — Turning to PISA
- 18:08 — Incentives decide behaviour
- 18:58 — More resources as the answer to everything
- 19:51 — Per-pupil spending over twenty years
- 20:37 — Homes, and homework
- 21:29 — Ability grouping and motivation
- 22:19 — Inclusion: a beautiful idea, and its limit
- 23:06 — The teacher who criticised and was targeted
- 23:56 — A question time that left out the obvious variable
- 24:42 — What the statistics show
- 25:31 — When most of the class needs support
- 26:20 — A language test for school? The proposal and its problems
- 27:11 — Language as a professional and civic question
- 27:58 — The language of the schoolyard
- 28:59 — Holding pupils back, and criteria
- 29:53 — Short-form content and attention
- 30:40 — Grand narratives nobody may question
- 31:38 — An observation from building sites
- 32:24 — Discrimination, or language skills?
- 33:15 — Anecdotes, and how much they weigh
- 34:23 — Why language skills decide things at work
- 35:12 — What should be done: fix the language programme, use the tools
- 36:03 — Selective immigration and the next generation
- 36:53 — The taboo, and the moral charge
- 37:44 — The comparison with religious prohibition
- 38:30 — Why communities produce taboos
- 39:18 — “It’s fine to be ordinary”
- 40:07 — The middle as the best place to stand
- 41:03 — What matters more than a career
- 41:49 — The counter: is the experience unique?
- 42:53 — Social media and the illusion
- 43:40 — Encouragement for second-language speakers
- 44:29 — Sign-off