申論題

Please read the following article carefully. Then 

        On a drizzly December morning in Helsinki, Finland, 11-year-old Minh Anh Ho is hunched over a microscope. Her classmates are busy with other tasks. One is interviewing the mayor for a TV news station. Another is running the electric company. As a researcher for a company that repurposes plastic, Minh Anh is analyzing a sheet of cling wrap. “It’s a really important job,” she says. “Plastic takes a really long time to disappear, so it would be good to come up with something else to do with it and not just throw it away.”
        The learning center where Minh Anh and her class are spending their day is designed to introduce kids to working life. Students run an imaginary town, with each kid doing a different job in a different business. Each year, roughly 83% of all sixth graders in Finland go through the program. It teaches them not just about business and working, but also, as Minh Anh’s “job” makes clear, about the circular economy.
         Most societies have linear economies. They operate on a “take, make, waste” model. This is when natural resources are taken from the Earth and made into products. Anything leftover (along with the products themselves, when they are no longer useful) is usually thrown away.         
         In 2016, Finland became the first country to adopt a “road map” to a circular economy. This model focuses on the transformation of existing products. Businesses rely on recycled or repurposed materials and use less raw material to make their products. That reduces the amount of waste going into landfills. “People think it’s just about recycling,” Nani Pajunen says. She’s a sustainability expert at Sitra, the group that has led Finland’s move toward a circular economy. “But really, it’s about rethinking everything—products, material development, how we consume.”
         Education has always been a central part of Finland’s plan. The key to changing a society, Pajunen says, is getting people to understand the need for a circular economy and how they can be part of it.         
          An educator named Anssi Almgren helped design the curriculum. “Children have so many great ideas,” he says. “We want to enable them to think about solutions.” But changing a society by educating its youth takes time. For example, Tina Harms, a middle-aged mother, had never heard of the term “circular economy.” Her daughter Karin, 19, says she has been aware of it “practically all my life.” Karin persuaded her family to work harder at recycling. At first, Tina was skeptical. Separating plastics was inconvenient.
         But Tina has a different view now. “I think that if you have a teenager with very strong feelings about something,” she says, “it’s very demotivating if we older ones don’t show that we’re ready to make the extra effort to change.”