Iceland

I miss Iceland. I was there for less than a week—maybe it’s my distant Viking heritage trying to call me home.

Actually, I’m a bit surprised, given that my first impression of Iceland was “barren.” The landscape along my ride from the airport to Reykjavik was about forty-five minutes, a long winding road with a stunningly beautiful ocean on one side, and broken, volcanic, treeless landscape on the other. After about twenty or thirty minutes, my impression had been modified from simply “barren” to “barren, stark, and dramatically beautiful.” The day is windy, enough so that the waves are being whipped up into whitecaps in stark contrast with the deep blue ocean and sky. It’s a clean, crisp and cold day, invigoratingly so. There is no pollution—I feel like I can see forever, right up to the glacial mountains in the distance.

Near to Reykjavik, the landscape changes. The hillsides become fissured, covered with moss and grasses still brown from winter. Curious stone monoliths dot the landscape, and I wonder if these have something to do with the legends of elves I’ve been cautioned not to bring up too much. A few lonely outposts along the oceanside soon turn into a city, modern but still quaint in many regards. The buildings are charming, colorful. The roads are clear and wide with lighting every hundred feet or so. I can’t help notice that most of the taxis seem to be Mercedes.

So what am I doing on a volcanic island midway between Greenland and Europe? Well, it’s about my kids, and finding a better lifestyle. I’m visiting CCP, an Icelandic company best described as a builder of the hands-down largest virtual world in existence today—although, if you’ve heard of them, odds are you identify CCP with EVE Online. CCP has bigger plans than EVE, and those plans are intriguing.

Moving to Iceland is an exciting prospect, but, alas, over the past year or so I haven’t been able to bring it to fruition. It’s far away, and the economic differences between the U.S. (and the complexity of owning real estate in the U.S.) make it a tough nut to crack.

As a U.S. citizen, I’ve always felt terribly dismayed at how insular the United States is. Very few of us travel internationally, and only marginally more seem to have any knowledge of the world at large. Most of our students can’t draw a map of the world or even a reasonably accurate map of Europe. In fact, I recently saw a video clip in which confused interviewees claimed they would support Bush’s plans to start a war with Australia, which had been incorrectly labeled as “Serbia” on a world map. On the whole, as a people the United States is not a part of the world. There is nothing beyond our borders worth talking about, unless perhaps it has some financial impact on our future.

There’s also the matter of the horrible state of education in this country. Granted, we still have good colleges, presuming you can pay for them. But pre-collegiate education is suffering—continuing a steady decline that began in the 1970’s. Bush’s “no child left behind” is, in fact, making sure that we leave nobody behind—at the cost of our nation’s future.

This is not the environment I would like my children to grow up in. And according to the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Iceland—for that matter, just about all of Europe, New Zealand and Australia—would be an immense improvement. The prospect of my children gaining a European eduction is irresistible… and yet, at least for the time being, out of reach.

The PISA study, published by the OECD in 20007, summarizes it’s content as:

More than 400 000 students from 57 countries making up close to 90% of the world economy took part in PISA 2006. The focus was on science but the assessment also included reading and mathematics and collected data on student, family and institutional factors that could help to explain differences in performance. This report summarises the main findings.

The study’s key findings include an extensive variety of statistics, focusing heavily on science but covering a variety of other areas as well. These key findings begin as such:

Finland, with an average of 563 score points, was the highest-performing country on the PISA 2006 science scale.

Six other high-scoring countries had mean scores of 530 to 542 points: Canada, Japan and New Zealand and the partner countries/economies Hong Kong-China, Chinese Taipei and Estonia. Australia, the Netherlands, Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic, Switzerland, Austria, Belgium and Ireland, and the partner countries/economies Liechtenstein, Slovenia and Macao-China also scored above the OECD average of 500 score points.

This goes on for quite a while before the United States is mentioned, and when it is, it’s to point out that the U.S. “performed below the OECD average.” Digging further into the study I find the results even more dismaying: For example, in mathematics, the U.S. places poorly, well below the OECD average (with a score similar to Azerbaijan and Croatia).

While the U.S. reading comprehension ratings in PIRLS (a related study) show more promise the statistics are still not outstanding. Worse, we also have high school students graduating with 4th grade reading levels (and illiteracy is startlingly high).

Despite the barren and stark (but dramatically beautiful) landscape, Iceland is looking more and more attractive. Consistently placing higher than the U.S. in most educational categories is only part of it. Icelanders are, by and large, more well-read and more well-educated that most U.S. citizens. Iceland’s largely socialized educational programs contribute to this countries position as having the highest literacy rate of any country. This is a society where you can sit down with just about anyone and have a cogent discussion on world politics, international policy, economics or market trends. I’d like my kids to have the opportunity to grow up in a society that’s not so insular it’s citizens have a hard time distinguishing Australia from Serbia.

So, back to Reykjavik. The city seems to be striking a balance between the modern and the rustic. It has a charm about it, something in the way houses are unique and built with old-world style and robust construction. There aren’t any McMansion development complexes with identical houses as far as the eye can see.