Dr. Leo Pekkala:

The Senator raises a very important question. As I said, we generally think our children and young people get some kind of education during their school years and their compulsory education, so we are not too worried about them. There is also, of course, a huge population of adults who have never received this kind of education, especially the ever-growing senior citizen population, who are often the grandparents of children and young people and spend a lot of time with them out of school.

It is really important to reach out to them. One way we have been doing that is through work with non-governmental organisations and public libraries. Public libraries also are really important especially for senior citizens. I also learned to use public libraries since I was a child. Libraries are a good place to reach the adult population and to share information. Also, senior citizens in particular quite often need technical help to understand how to use different services that society is offering more and more digitally. While they are being guided in how to do banking business or deal with tax issues, they also get information about fake news and disinformation, etc. In the ideal world, that works really well. This does not happen in every library and everywhere so there is a lot of work to be done but that is one example of a success story.