I am aware that it’s cliché to look to the Nordic countries as ideal models and I’m sure their systems have their own deficiencies, but my experiences teaching in Scandinavia still shocked me. I saw children waltz into school to loud house music blaring from the school speakers, I went into classrooms where no one calls their teachers ‘Miss’ or ‘Sir’, and yet this lack of formality does not seem to be affecting the quality of their educational outcomes.
