Freedom's Sound
Format: DVD | Streaming | Download
Length:
12:00
Grade Level: 4-12+ | Price: $ 15.00
Closed Captioned:
DVD: English
Streaming: English | Danish | Norwegian | Swedish
How do you benefit from others' innovations?
The Estonia Piano Company is one of Estonia's most remarkable success stories. Under communist rule, the company built pianos exclusively for the Soviet Union. There was no competition, no incentive to improve. The instruments were sturdy, but hardly world-class. After independence, the company had to quickly adapt, or fail in the face of competition from around the world. Through entrepreneurship and innovation, the Estonia Piano Company reinvented itself, and now produces pianos for the world market that rival Steinway in quality—at about half the price. For workers as well as consumers, Estonia has shown the world that freedom works!


Business / Family & Consumer Science
Economics
Music / Art
World History / Geography
Europe
Free Markets
Government
Property Rights
Communism
Estonia
Piano Construction
Soviet Union
Trade
This DVD tied in beautifully with our history studies, as we are currently learning about the WWII and post WWII time periods. It also complimented our current year debate topic of Russia. As a follow-up we viewed The Singing Revolution, loved it!
Nancy Estes
Tallahassee, FL
This is extremely well produced and tells an important story about how entrepreneurial freedom is related to free market practices.
Mark Dunn
Martinez, GA
Great video to show the transition a country goes through when moving from a centrally planned economy towards a free market economy. It uses personal testimonials to show the difference that freedom can make to encourage a nation to grow and innovate.
Gail Peterson
Fargo, ND
Thank you for providing a current look at life after the fall of communism and the break-up of the Soviet Union. It helps so much in teaching about communism to be able to contrast it with a real life story.
Kari Catanzaro
Bunker Hill, IN
My students were fascinated by the idea of communism vs. a free trade society in new ways because of this video presentation. It pricked their interest in entreprenuership and gave lots of opportunity to point out the founding of America's economy and how we are doing economically at present. We had lots of good discussion about inflation and government regulations. It was easy to engage their prior knowledge about America's fight for freedom from England and connect that to Estonia's freedom from the USSR. We really had fun!
Kay Dick
Vincent, AL