The indication that there has been a large decline in knowledge among the top students is reinforced by the TIMSS Advanced, a study that measures the level of knowledge in mathematics and physics of finalyear upper secondary students specializing in technology and science. Sweden was the top-performing country in the first comparison in 1995. In the 2008 study, Swedish scores in mathematics and physics fell sharply, both absolutely and relative to other countries. Only one student in one hundred achieved an advanced level in mathematics, and 71 percent did not attain the intermediate level.

The level of knowledge that students have at age 15 significantly affects the level they attain when the same group is tested again as adults. This effect is demonstrated in the differences in scores between various age groups in the OECD's PIAAC survey of adult skills and in a comparison of PISA and PIAAC scores for the age groups that took both tests.

Diagnostic tests in mathematics taken by new students at Chalmers University of Technology provide an opportunity to gain an understanding of how performance in mathematics has evolved since the early 1970s. The results of these tests show large differences in students' levels of prior knowledge depending on when they attended elementary and secondary school.

A large proportion of new students at Chalmers University of Technology obtain extraordinarily poor scores in the diagnostic test in mathematics despite high school-leaving grades. This suggests that the final-year grades are not a good measure of the level of knowledge they have attained. Second, it shows that it is possible to spend 12 years at a Swedish school, the last three years of which are spent specializing in mathematics and the natural sciences in secondary school, obtain high grades—and still, have limited mathematics proficiency.

Although there is a considerable lag, the decline in knowledge among Swedish students is likely to have strong effects on future economic growth. A rough calculation based on updated cross-country estimates suggests that the Swedish growth rate per capita may fall by 0.4–0.5 percentage points. Furthermore, the positive growth effect is expected to be substantially larger if the share of students attaining the advanced level is increased compared to an equally large increase (in terms of percentage points) in the share who attain the basic minimum level.

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#### CHAPTER 4

## The Malaise in the School System

As shown in the previous chapter, student performance in Sweden, as measured primarily by the large-scale PISA and TIMSS international assessments, has deteriorated considerably since the 1990s and early 2000s. However, at the time of writing, a significant drop in students' knowledge and skills is not the only problem facing the school system. In addition, there is a deep malaise within Swedish education that takes many forms and affects both students and teachers.

The present chapter explores this malaise. We begin by reviewing the symptoms that relate to students, including systemic grade inflation, conspicuous differences in performance between boys and girls, a surge of undemocratic attitudes, pervasive problems with bullying, disruptive classroom behavior, truancy, and, finally, a significant rise in mental health problems. We then discuss the poor state of the teaching profession, which is marred, among other things, by low social status, a high dropout rate among students in education degree programs, and the loss of its professional ethos. We attempt to answer the question of the causes of these symptoms in later chapters of this book.

## The Students

#### *Grade Inflation*

While the results of PISA and the TIMSS strongly indicate a decline in knowledge and skills among Swedish students, final grades paint a different picture. Paradoxically, during the very period in which the PISA and TIMSS scores fell sharply, the average merit rating (based on grades) in the final year of elementary school improved markedly (see Fig. 4.1).1

**Fig. 4.1** Average merit rating 1998–2012 and PISA scores, 2000–2012 (*Source* Swedish National Agency for Education [2001, 2004a, 2007, 2010, 2013a, 2014b] and OECD [2015]. *Note* Sweden changed its grade system in the fall of 2012, which makes comparability with previous grades difficult and explains why our figure does not include later years. It may be noted that the Swedish National Agency for Education's [2014b] comparison shows that grade inflation was not halted by the introduction of a new grading system. They found that the average merit rating increased from 211.4 to 214.8 from 2012 to 2014)

1 The merit rating in elementary and secondary school is calculated based on the pupil's grades. Pupils are ranked for admission to programs available in secondary school/higher education according to this merit rating. Sweden changed its grading system in the fall of 2012, which makes comparability with previous grades difficult and explains why Fig. 4.1 does not include later years.

This change is highly suspicious. Indeed, the disconnect between international assessments of Swedish students' performance and their grades is compelling evidence of rampant grade inflation in Swedish elementary schools, and the same problem is evident in secondary education, according to research by the Swedish economist Jonas Vlachos.2 The declining results in the diagnostic tests in mathematics taken by new students starting engineering programs at Chalmers University of Technology, who were accepted on the strength of their high grades, is another strong sign that the connection between knowledge and grades is equally tenuous at the secondary level.3

In terms of grading, Sweden appears to have returned to where it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, when "marks in Swedish schools had been unified in expression but not in meaning."4 In the early 1930s, the Swedish psychologist and mathematics educator Frits Wigforss noted that the situation in regard to grading at the elementary level had become "chaotic" and that some measure needed to be taken to improve it.5 In response, Wigforss helped to design standardized tests as a means to regulate grades and make them comparable across schools, and these tests were implemented in the late 1940s. "The purpose would be not to dictate the assignment of marks to any student but rather to show teachers how the marks they were giving compared with those of other teachers."6 The average results on the standardized tests in a class determined the average grade in the class, while the grade of an individual student could deviate both upward and downward from his or her test result. This norm-referenced approach imposed some needed order and moderation in the grading system and remained in effect as intended by Wigforss until the 1980s.

2 See Vlachos (2010, 2016). Henrekson and Vlachos (2009) report that the number of students who graduated from high school with the top grade in all subjects increased by 2800 percent from 1997 to 2007, and in some schools, more than ten percent of the graduates attained the maximum average grade, as compared to a national average of 0.7 percent.

3 See Chapter 3.

4 Kilpatrick and Johansson (1994, p. 21).

5 Cited in Kilpatrick and Johansson (1994, p. 19).

6 Kilpatrick and Johansson (1994, p. 17).

Grading at the secondary level was, after the early 1860s, moderated and controlled by the formal final examination (the *studentexamen*).7 Under this examination system, traveling external examiners who were appointed by the Crown—often university professors—arrived at schools and conducted or oversaw oral examinations in different subjects (complemented by written examinations). This form of examination continued to exist until the 1960s and was considered a success. On its centennial in 1962, a historical review observed that it provided a uniquely fair system for awarding grades.8 Nonetheless, in 1968, the last group of students took the final examination, in part due to the rapid expansion of the number of secondary school students after World War II.9 After that, standardized testing became the method of preventing arbitrary grading decisions and grade inflation at the secondary level as well.10 As an additional form of control, secondary school teachers were required to justify in writing why they wanted to assign grades that greatly diverged from the results of the standardized tests.11

The purpose of this historical digression is to show that for a long time, the Swedish school system ensured that grades were fair and comparable. Research shows that students learn less when grading is not stringent,12 but accurate grades are particularly important in a country such as Sweden, where grades are the most important selection criterion for higher education. Until 1991, they were the *only* selection criterion for people entering higher education below age 25. However, the inconsistencies that we describe above clearly indicate major flaws in the way

7 Lundahl (2015). This examination form replaced the previous "double" examination that had been used in Sweden since the late 1600s, in which pupils underwent exams both at the end of secondary school and before entering university. This previous system was frequently misused, perhaps particularly by the universities, and plagued by nepotism and arbitrary decision-making.

8 Thorén (1963, p. 71). It should be noted that the pupil's overall performance and progress in secondary school was also weighed into his or her final grades.

9 See Chapter 2.

10 Lost in this change, however, was the ability to administer external examination tests at the end of secondary school. Empirical studies show a robust causal relationship between external examination tests and pupils' results in international academic assessments, suggesting that such tests have an important effect on knowledge acquisition. See, e.g., Bishop (1997) and Woessman (2003).

11 Swedish National Agency for Education (2005).

12 See Betts and Grogger (2003); Figlio and Lucas (2004); Bonnesrönning (2004).

grades are awarded in Sweden's schools today, resulting in substantial arbitrariness and unfairness in admission to tuition-free institutions of higher learning.

#### *Boys versus Girls*

Another noteworthy development in the educational system pertains to the academic performance of boys versus girls. As noted by the Swedish National Agency for Education at the time, the fall in performance in PISA 2012 was significantly (in statistical terms) greater among Swedish boys than girls. Compared to 2003, the overall result for boys declined in mathematics by 35 points (−26 points for girls), in science by 23 points (−14 points for girls), and in reading comprehension by 41 points (−26 points for girls).13 In TIMSS 2011, compared to TIMSS 1995, the overall result in science for boys in 8th grade fell by 51 points (−35 points for girls), while there was no significant gender difference in the decline in mathematics since 1995.14

In PISA 2015, as in the previous cycle, there was no gender difference in mathematics.15 However, in the OECD as a whole, boys outperformed girls in mathematics. The same appears to have become true in science. In PISA 2012, Swedish girls outperformed boys in science for the first time,16 and a small, nonsignificant advantage was observable in 2015 as well, while in the OECD as a whole, boys held a significant advantage over girls. In regard to reading comprehension, Swedish boys raised their results compared to girls in PISA 2015. In the previous cycle, the gap was a staggering 51 points in favor of girls, and the share of boys not reaching baseline proficiency Level 2 exceeded 30 percent. In 2015, this gap in reading comprehension, while still very large, had shrunk somewhat to 39 points, but the switch to a digital test likely influenced that result.17 These facts lend indirect support to the presumption that, on average, boys are disadvantaged relative to girls in the Swedish school system.

14 Swedish National Agency for Education (2012).

15 Swedish National Agency for Education (2016b).

16 Swedish National Agency for Education (2013a).

17 Aftonbladet (2016).

13 Swedish National Agency for Education (2013a).

of their parents (%)

p. 10)

If we turn to Swedish measures of academic performance, the pattern of boys falling behind girls persists. A higher share of girls than boys reaches the knowledge requirements of each course; girls, on average, receive higher grades than boys in every subject; and girls leave elementary school with a higher average merit rating than boys. Interestingly, in this context, parents' level of education does not seem to matter. As shown in Table 4.1, even among children of parents with the highest level of education, girls outperform boys.18 It is also noteworthy that a staggering two-thirds of boys with parents in the lowest educational category failed at least one subject in the final year of elementary school.

Clearly, the gender differential in grades partly reflects a substantive gender difference in knowledge attainment. However, there is also evidence to suggest that there is a grading bias in the educational system that affects boys negatively. A 2019 study compared students' final mathematics grades in elementary school with data from a secondary school introductory test in mathematics administered yearly in the municipality of Stockholm to evaluate the quality of Stockholm's elementary schools. There was a substantial difference between boys' final grades and test results, indicating that boys are given lower grades than they deserve.19 Thus, it seems likely that boys' lower grades are explained by a combination of lower performance and discrimination in grading.

18 For further details and the development over time, see Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (2019).

19 Berg, Palmgren, and Tyrefors (2020).

#### *Undemocratic Attitudes and "Fake News"*

As we show in Chapter 6, one of the motives for abandoning the old educational system in Sweden and replacing it with the unity school in the 1960s was the Social Democrats' hope that the change would foster more "democratically minded" citizens.20 The responsibility of schools to inculcate democratic values in students is also laid down in Swedish law.

Ostensibly, Swedish schools appear to do a good job of educating students in democracy. In the latest (2016) round of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS), which examines the civic knowledge and attitudes of 8th grade students, Sweden stood out as one of the top countries.21 However, if we examine other available evidence, a completely different picture emerges. It turns out, for example, that a majority of Swedes aged 16–25 (with recent experience of the school system) support the idea of a technocracy in which power resides with an elite of experts.22

In 2011, the political scientist and then leader of the World Values Survey–Sweden Staffan Lindberg reported in an op-ed in a national newspaper that 21 percent of Swedes aged 18–29 answering the WVS survey were willing to sell their democratic vote, and 28 percent were willing to electorally support a candidate standing for political office in exchange for a promise of a paid job.23 Moreover, approximately 23 percent answered that they were indifferent about living in a democracy versus a dictatorship, and 26 percent supported the idea that Sweden should be ruled by "a strong leader who did not have to care about Parliament or elections." In his op-ed, Lindberg compared the results to attitudes in less developed countries, such as Ghana, and pointed out that only a minuscule minority of older Swedes, who had their own memories of European dictatorships, wanted to discard democracy. He also noted that a mere 7 percent of young people in neighboring Denmark were prepared to sell their vote,24 thus suggesting that such antidemocratic sentiments may be more widespread in Sweden.

20 Richardson (2010).

21 Swedish National Agency for Education (2017a).

22 Göthberg (2018).

23 Lindberg (2011a).

24 Lindberg (2011b).

In a 2007 survey conducted among young people in Sweden aged 15–20, a majority (56 percent) answered "Don't know" when asked whether societies based on Western market economic concepts are democratic.25 Moreover, 40 percent believed that the practice of Communism has led to increased wealth, and 22 percent supported the claim that Communism represents a democratic form of government. In general, the survey appeared to show "a significant uncertainty among the students on the meaning of basic concepts such as democracy and dictatorship."26 That was also the impression given by a 2005 report on the democratic competencies of Swedish 9th graders, which noted that the students' understanding of fundamental democratic institutions was so weak that the high proportion of passing grades in civics should be subject to scrutiny.27

In more recent years, "fake news" and internet hoaxes have increasingly become a topic of concern to democratic societies. However, when the abilities of Swedish secondary school students aged 16–19 to display so-called civic online reasoning and separate credible and vetted information from false news and advertisements were tested, the results indicated that a majority of students struggle to do so. "While most students rate themselves as quite skilled at finding and scrutinizing online information," a 2019 study found, "most of them (88 percent) could not separate news from advertisements in Sweden's most-read newspaper."28 Moreover, less than half of the students (44 percent) identified a news text from Swedish public radio as more credible than what the study described as a propagandistic "right-wing populist text," while 35 percent rated the texts equally credible. Thus, secondary school students appear to be "not very skilled at determining credibility in critical and constructive ways."29

#### *A Dysfunctional Work Environment*

The psychosocial environment in the classroom, and in the school more widely, plays an important part in children's learning. A lack of structure

25 Hjemdahl and Andersson (2007).

26 Hjemdahl and Andersson (2007, p. 6).

27 Oscarsson (2005, p. 35).

28 Nygren and Guath (2019, p. 28).

29 Nygren and Guath (2019, p. 32).

and peace causes students' survival instincts to react to perceived dangers and crowd out cognitive capacity for knowledge acquisition.30 In the long run, exposure to disruptive peers has been shown to significantly reduce future earnings.31 Against this backdrop, it is disconcerting that every seventh student in the final year of elementary school in Sweden, in total 15,000 students, does not feel safe in school.32 Expressed in other terms, this means that three to four students in each class do not find school a safe place.33 In some schools, as many as one-quarter of the students feel unsafe.34

One reason for this state of affairs may be that bullying is on the rise. The share of students aged 11–15 who have recently experienced bullying in school increased from 12.6 percent in the 2013/14 school year to 19.4 percent in the 2017/18 school year,35 and approximately one-quarter of all elementary school principals in Sweden report that abuse and violence take place in their schools every week.36

There are also symptoms of a general social disorder in schools that affects students' sense of safety and well-being and, ultimately, their chances of learning and performing well. Large groups of students in both (lower and higher) elementary and secondary education feel that there are severe problems with rule-following and norm-accepting behavior in their schools. For example, 50 percent of students in the final year of elementary education complain that rules are not being followed by other students. Moreover, 34 percent of students in year 9 of elementary school say that they find it challenging to work during lessons because of classroom disruption. These results are reinforced by the fact that one out of three elementary school teachers (33 percent) reports that the problem of maintaining order in the classroom cuts into a significant proportion of his or her teaching time.37 More than one-fifth of 9th grade teachers

30 Ingvar (2017). For more evidence, see, e.g., Lee, Lee, and Kim (2017).

31 Carrell, Hoekstra, and Kuka (2018).

also report having to wait a long time for students to quiet down before being able to even begin their lessons.38

Other sources of disruption to the social order in school and student performance are late arrivals in the morning and truancy.39 Sweden has one of the largest proportions of students who arrive late for school more than one in two 15-year-old students (54 percent)—among OECD countries.40 The propensity among Swedish students to skip classes during the school day also exceeds the OECD average.41

In this normless environment, many students face educational failure. Indeed, one-quarter of all students at the elementary level leave school without having met the knowledge requirements for a passing grade in at least one subject, and more than 15 percent leave without a passing grade in one of the three core subjects, Swedish, English, and mathematics, meaning that they are ineligible for secondary school entrance.42 Among students at the secondary level, roughly one-quarter fail to graduate within the normal three-year period.43 For those students, the consequences are severe because "[t]he Swedish labor market is particularly unforgiving of those with weak qualifications."44 Less than 70 percent of those who have failed to graduate from secondary school are employed, and their incomes are only 60 percent of the median income of 45-year-olds, compared to an average employment rate at age 33 exceeding 90 percent and incomes averaging 80 percent of the median of 45-year-olds.45

38 Swedish National Agency for Education (2018b).

39 See, e.g., Buscha and Conte (2014) for evidence that truancy negatively impacts student performance.

40 Measured as having arrived late for school at least once in the two weeks prior to the PISA test (OECD, 2016a).

41 OECD (2015).

42 Ekonomifakta (2019).

43 Swedish National Agency for Education (2018a).

44 Nordström Skans, Eriksson, and Hensvik (2017, p. 93).

45 Nordström Skans, Eriksson, and Hensvik (2017).

#### *Mental Health*

The final symptom of a malaise in Swedish education that relates to students is an increasing problem with mental health. For example, depression and anxiety among children aged 10–17 increased by more than 100 percent from 2006 to 2016. According to the National Board of Health and Welfare, the reasons for this dramatic increase are most likely linked to schooling and the transition from school to adult life.46 Similarly, physicians have suggested that the soaring prescriptions for ADHD drugs in Sweden, where in several municipalities as many as 13 percent of boys are medicated for ADHD,47 are related to factors within the school system.48

More recent studies of students' mental health also suggest that stress is becoming more prominent. For instance, in the 2017/18 school year, 73 percent of 15-year-old girls and 49 percent of 15-year-old boys reported feeling stressed or very stressed by their schoolwork, which was the highest rate recorded since the late 1990s.49 Other milder psychiatric conditions, such as irritability, dejection, nervousness, and insomnia, have also significantly increased in prevalence since the mid-1980s among schoolchildren, particularly among girls.50

## The Teachers

#### *The Low Status and Shortage of Teachers*

An extensive body of literature documents the existence of "teacher effects" on students' educational achievement.51 Hence, one would expect teaching to be a respected and attractive profession in Sweden, as was the case during "the silver age" of Swedish education.52 However, in 2013, only 5 percent of Swedish teachers deemed that their profession was considered prestigious, and barely half said that they would

51 For an overview, see, e.g., Blazar and Kraft (2017) and Hattie (2009).

46 National Board of Health and Welfare (2017).

47 Blume (2019).

48 Engström and Gustavsson (2016).

49 National Board of Health and Welfare (2018).

50 National Board of Health and Welfare (2018).

52 See Chapter 2.

choose the same occupation again.53 It is also clear that fewer people want to be teachers. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to speak of a crisis in teacher recruitment in Sweden. Approximately 10 percent— 13,000 teachers—leave the profession every year due to retirement or (more often) career change to another field, while the annual number of newly graduated teachers is merely half as large.54

The main reason for the shortage of teachers is a high dropout rate among students in education degree programs, which have by far the largest dropout rate of all comparable college programs.55 Among those training to become a teacher in the upper grades of elementary school and secondary school (*ämneslärare*) or a teacher in the lower grades of elementary school (*grundlärare*), 35 percent and 26 percent, respectively, drop out at an early stage, and a mere 47 percent and 60 percent, respectively, eventually graduate.

Another significant component of this crisis, reflecting the lack of status afforded to teaching at the time of writing, is the number and selection of applicants to education degree programs. In the early 1980s, there were approximately 10 applicants per place; in more recent years, however, the number of applicants has varied nationally between 1.2 and 1.9 per place.56 The number of applicants for mathematics and natural science programs is particularly low.57 This suggests that the most talented Swedish students are no longer attracted to teaching as a career. Indeed, a sizable share of applicants have left secondary school with low grades.58 One-quarter of the applicants who began teacher training

53 Swedish National Agency for Education (2014a). This was the lowest share among all countries participating in the 2013 cycle of the OECD's Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS), in which the question was asked. In the latest round, conducted in 2018, the share of teachers answering that their profession is considered prestigious, while still low and below the average for the OECD, had increased to 11 percent (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2019b).

54 See Henrekson (2017). Teachers with less than three years of work experience are the group with the strongest inclination toward career change among those groups employed in Sweden's public sector (Calmfors et al., 2016).

55 Svensson and Berlin Kolm (2017).

56 Båvner (2018).

57 Henrekson (2017).

58 Not only secondary school grades but also cognitive ability and leadership skills have declined among new teachers (*ämneslärare*) since the early 1990s (Grönqvist and Vlachos, 2016).

during the 2000s had a score of less than 12 points (out of a maximum of 20 points) on the university entrance scale, which is a substantially higher share than the average for students attending higher education in general.59

The share of students with a working-class background and parents with low educational attainment has also increased, but perhaps the most noteworthy statistic is the share of teaching students whose parents were teachers themselves. In the early 1990s, 24 percent of male and 22 percent of female teaching students were children of teachers, but in the late 2000s, the share dropped to 12 percent and merely 10 percent, respectively.60 In fact, children of teachers have fled from teaching at a higher rate than children of any other professional group,61 suggesting that many teachers have become deeply unhappy in their work and do not feel that they can recommend that their children follow in their footsteps.

#### *Working Conditions*

Teachers are one of the least satisfied groups in the Swedish labor market. In a 2006 survey, almost one-quarter of teachers reported being moderately or very unhappy,62 and judging by more recent information, the situation has not improved. More than half of Swedish teachers experience stress in the workplace, sick leave due to psychiatric disorders is more common among teachers than in other professional groups,63 and four out of ten active teachers are considering leaving the profession.64 Moreover, in international comparisons, such as the OECD Teaching and Learning International Survey (TALIS) and the surveys of teachers in the TIMSS studies, Swedish teachers are the least positive about their working conditions.65

59 Bertilsson (2014). A grade point average of 12 or less means that the student was in the bottom 15 percent of graduates from secondary school.

60 Bertilsson (2014).

61 Bertilsson, Broady, and Börjesson (2014).

62 Stenlås (2009).

63 Swedish Teachers' Union (2014). Sick leave due to depression is 50 percent and 25 percent more common among elementary and secondary school teachers, respectively.

64 Swedish National Agency for Education (2016a).

65 OECD (2016b). The 2011 TIMSS included questionnaires for teachers regarding their working conditions. Swedish teachers were the most negative; a mere 10 percent

The problem does not seem to be primarily a question of low pay. The relative wage of teachers stopped falling in the late 1980s66 and has increased sharply in recent years. From 2010 to 2016, the average salaries for teachers in elementary and secondary schools increased by 27.5 percent and 24.2 percent, respectively, while the average increases for full-time white-collar workers and engineers (with a master's degree) in the private sector were 14.5 percent and 12.4 percent, respectively. In other words, teachers' relative wages increased by approximately 12 percentage points relative to comparable groups in the 2010s.67 The primary sources of discontent are therefore likely to be found elsewhere.

One of the more likely reasons for teachers' unhappiness is that threats and violence directed against teachers became increasingly common during the first decade of the 2000s.68 Since then, abuse in schools has escalated. According to the Swedish Work Environment Authority, the number of reported threats made by students in elementary and secondary school increased by 35 percent from 197 to 266 between 2014 and 2018, and the number of reported physical abuse cases increased by 89 percent from 319 to 602 during the same period.69 The actual number of threats and attacks against teachers is significantly higher, as less than every tenth case is reported.70

Unsurprisingly, against this background, one in five teachers say they go to work with trepidation,71 and as many teaching students have considered dropping out of their training because of concerns over the surge of threats and violence in schools.72 Add to this the pressure imposed by many parents on teachers. According to the Swedish Teachers' Union, 70 percent of teachers have been pressured by parents to make changes to their teaching or award a better grade to an individual student,

indicated that there were "no or almost no problems" related to working conditions (Håkansson and Sundberg, 2016, pp. 65–66).

66 Persson and Skult (2014).

67 Ekonomifakta (2017); Swedish Association of Graduate Engineers (2017); Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions (2017).

68 Jelmini (2014).

69 Letmark (2019).

and more than half (54 percent) have been threatened with reprisals for not complying with the parents' demands.73

A number of public administration reforms have also changed teachers' work environment and led many of them to lament lost autonomy and influence over working conditions.74 Here, we refer to the controversial introduction of "new public management" (NPM) doctrines in Swedish schools (see Box 4.1). Since the beginning of the 1990s, tight controls on teachers and monitoring in line with NPM have increased, reflecting similar developments in other public professions.75 Typical of the decline in teachers' autonomy is that they are now obligated to remain on the school premises even when they are not teaching. They are expected to spend much of their nonteaching time documenting what they do in the classroom and the intellectual trajectory of individual students in their classes. These demands have reduced the share of work time at school spent teaching to barely one-third,76 and the time available for preparation has dwindled. Thus, to the detriment of teacher satisfaction, teaching has become micromanaged and "proletarianized."77

#### **Box 4.1: New Public Management, NPM**

New Public Management, customarily abbreviated NPM, a term first attributed to political scientist Christopher Hood (1991), refers to an effort to correct perceived shortcomings of the "old" public management through the use of private-sector norms and techniques (Dunleavy and Hood, 1994).

Beginning in the late 1970s, variants of this agenda began to appear among Western countries and grew widespread in the 1980s and 1990s. The public-sector reforms that were implemented typically included some or all of the following seven elements (Hood, 1991, 1995): hands-on professional management; explicit standards and measures of performance; output controls coupled with rewards and incentives; disaggregation of units in the provision of public services; stress on private-sector styles of management practice; and discipline and parsimony in resource use.

73 Bergling (2016).

77 Bottery (1996, p. 180).

76 Lewin (2014).

By the early 1990s, this international trend had reached Sweden; NPM measures were then introduced into core areas of welfare provision, not least education (Jarl, Fredriksson, and Persson, 2012).

#### *A Lost Professional Ethos*

While the reduced autonomy of Swedish teachers contrasts sharply with the traditional understanding of the profession,78 it might not have happened if teachers themselves (and their trade union representatives) had not changed their attitudes and abandoned the old professional ethos of teaching. As previously discussed,79 older generations of teachers' strong commitment to nonpecuniary goals and values afforded them considerable autonomy and freedom from bureaucratic encumbrances in their work. There were of course exceptions, but on the whole, teachers could simply be trusted to perform to the best of their abilities because they were driven by an intrinsic motivation to impart knowledge, which also endowed them with social status.

However, for some reason, Swedish teachers and their trade unions, by and large, lost that intrinsic motivation and came to emphasize extrinsic, particularly monetary rewards. Indeed, Swedish teachers believe, to a greater extent than their colleagues in neighboring Norway, that "individual pay motivate[s] them to do a good job."80 As an interviewed teacher and union representative explained, "One needs [individualized salaries]. If not, nothing happens."81 Swedish teachers are also more inclined to behave individualistically and (often abruptly) change schools, causing disruption to students and colleagues, than teachers in the other Nordic countries.82 Research also suggests that the relative wage is a key factor in the decision to stay or leave.83

78 Helldén (2002); Sehested (2002).

79 See Chapter 2.

80 Helgoy and Homme (2007, p. 241).

When a traditional public-service ethos is lacking, other management principles, such as NPM, become necessary.84 That is how NPM found its way into the Swedish school system. But why did Swedish teachers demote teaching, which previously was viewed as a vocation, to a regular job with primarily extrinsic rewards? Why, more generally, is the educational system at all levels, from the teachers down, in such poor shape? The remaining chapters provide some answers.

## In Sum

We have shown in this chapter how a number of serious problems have emerged in Swedish schools in recent decades. A first obvious indication of a malaise is that the falling results in international assessments were not reflected in average merit ratings, which instead increased. As a result, what had been an excellent grade point average a few years before and had ensured admission to attractive university programs was no longer competitive. Moreover, boys' grades became substantially lower. This reflects that girls perform better than boys, but there are also signs of boys being discriminated against in grading.

Among students, there is evidence of declining civic mindedness and inability to distinguish between credible information and "fake news." Moreover, the work environment is marred by several problems, including rising levels of bullying, unacceptable levels of norm- and rule-breaking, truancy, and a high incidence of mental health problems.

The malaise is not restricted to students; teachers are also afflicted. Teachers self-report that their professional status is low in society, teachertraining programs do not attract top-level students, roughly half of the students in those programs drop out, and a substantial share of those who graduate leave the profession after a couple of years. A sharp rise in the relative wage of teachers in recent years has not succeeded in improving matters more than marginally. Absenteeism, psychiatric disorders, and exposure to threats and violence are far higher than in other comparable professions. Finally, the wholesale introduction of NPM methods has robbed teachers of the professional autonomy that used to be a key element of the profession's attractiveness.

84 This has been argued by, among others, Hood (1991).

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## Two Views of Knowledge and Teaching

It is well known that laws, regulations, norms, and other formal and informal institutions affect and incentivize individual behavior and human interaction.1 The Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economic historian Douglass North even defined institutions as "the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction."2 Therefore, an explanation of agents' behavior and the outcome of their joint efforts in an area of study must identify the most relevant institutions and their incentive effects. This is no less true for the educational sector. Thus, in order to account for the deterioration in students' knowledge and other signs of a malaise in the provision of elementary and secondary education in Sweden, we need to examine the institutional setting of the Swedish school system. That is the task of the remainder of this book. We begin this chapter with a discussion of what we consider to be a critically important, arguably the single most important, institution for the functioning and development of any school system, namely, the stipulated view of knowledge.

Given that there is virtually unanimous agreement today that the goal of a national school system should be to enable students to gain the knowledge and skills necessary not only to sustain themselves but also to flourish and contribute to the advancement of the society in which they are expected to live as adults, the matter may seem simple.

1 See, e.g., Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson (2005); North (1990); Schotter (2008). 2 North (1990, p. 3).

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Henrekson and J. Wennström, *Dumbing Down*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3\_5

However, it is precisely here that differences of opinion appear. There is no consensus on what knowledge should be taught or how it should be taught. School systems, in fact, diverge widely in their perspectives on these issues, causing significant disparities in what students leaving school actually know as well as in the working conditions experienced by teachers.

The divergence boils down to what are essentially two different indeed, irreconcilable—views of the nature of knowledge. During the period of educational modernization in Sweden and the industrialized world more broadly that we have previously referred to as "the silver age," it was taken as a given that objective knowledge specific to various fields exists, that it is accessible through systematic study directed by competent teachers, and that it serves as a precondition for the development of a number of important skills. We call this the classical view of knowledge.

The classical view is still predominantly accepted in Asian societies, but many school systems elsewhere in the world have in recent decades come to adopt another view, which, when taken to its most extreme form, considers all knowledge claims to be subjective and ultimately nontransferable from teacher to student. The emphasis is, therefore, on self-learning of content that students themselves deem relevant to their schooling and training in critical thinking, a skill that is assumed to be generic in nature and divorced from the acquisition of domainspecific knowledge. As the next chapter shows in some detail, this newly emerging view of knowledge was in some ways anticipated by the ideas of the progressive pedagogical reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s. However, it is more rightly identified as a postmodern social constructivist stance, so we use that term throughout the book.

We define "view of knowledge" in terms of the Polish philosopher Ludwik Fleck's concept of "thought style,"3 which served as an important inspiration for Thomas Kuhn's later concept of "paradigm." Thought styles, simply put, are manners of thinking that link the members of a particular social unit, a "thought collective," to draw on Fleck's terminology, and determine how they interpret phenomena relevant to their interests. We thus regard views of knowledge as thought styles that shape how individuals (for example, scholars, pedagogues, and education policymakers) belonging to different thought collectives within the broadly

3 Fleck (1979 [1935]).

conceived field of education understand what knowledge is and what formal education can and should do to help students acquire it.

Views of knowledge are informal institutions, but they can be and are, in fact, codified into explicit rules that determine the course a school system takes, such as national curricula, teaching instructions, and grading criteria. That is why we suggest that the adopted view of knowledge is one of the most fundamental institutions of schooling. It is also, we argue, a key determinant of the success of the educational system. Indeed, depending on which of the two main conflicting views of knowledge is emphasized, the system will produce either high-quality education or the kind of problems outlined in the previous chapters. For us, it is clearly the classical view that gives rise to the first outcome, while the alternative view leads down an educationally destructive path.

We return to that argument later in the book; for now, we examine the different views of knowledge and their implications for pedagogical practice in schools. We first more fully present the classical view of knowledge and then describe the postmodern social constructivist view that has unseated and replaced the former perspective in much of contemporary education.

## The Classical View

Our species, *Homo sapiens*, would not have been able to dominate Earth if our innate ability for learning had not been extraordinary.4 However, if we actually have such natural talent for learning, why do we make people spend most of their youth in classrooms? According to adherents of the classical view of knowledge, there is a straightforward reason, although it may have been intuited for a long time rather than clearly formulated5: namely, that formal education is a technology developed and applied to compensate for what the human mind is innately able to do only poorly.

One does not need to attend school to learn how to walk, run, play, recognize the objects and the people one depends on, speak well enough

4 See, e.g., Henrich (2016).

5 The pedagogy of the old Swedish school system, discussed in Chapter 2, was, for example, clearly very much in line with the notions described in this section, even though its practitioners were not versed in modern evolutionary psychology.

to function within the family and among close neighbors, or immediately tell how many items there are in a set of up to four.6 Learning and perfecting such skills is typically done voluntarily and found enjoyable by children because it is a *biologically primary* task. In other words, the human brain is designed to spontaneously learn to perform this task. However, learning to master knowledge and skills such as reading and writing, arithmetic, and science is a very different matter.7 Those kinds of knowledge and skills are *biologically secondary* in nature since they are not normally applied in the everyday life of a child and in any case were discovered only fairly recently in the history of our species. As a result, an innate talent to acquire them in the same effortless way has not yet evolved—if it ever will.8

Attaining biologically secondary knowledge and skills requires deliberate practice, and since it does not come naturally to human beings, the learning process is not always pleasurable.9 On the contrary, we learn, for example, a mathematical skill only with great effort, and we have to repeat and repeat and repeat this new skill before it can become automatic and second nature. We can then use it to learn a more advanced skill in the same area, and so on. In the classical view, the purpose of schools is to provide an arena for the acquisition of such hard-won, biologically secondary knowledge and skills. As the Australian educational psychologist John Sweller writes, "We invented schools in order to teach biologically secondary knowledge because, unlike primary knowledge, it is unlikely to be acquired without the functions and procedures found in educational establishments."10

Particularly important in this context, according to the classical view, is the teacher's explicit instruction in the attainment of biologically secondary knowledge and skills and his or her encouragement of

6 Henrich (2016).

9 In fact, recent research has suggested that the active promotion of "student wellbeing" in schools may negatively impact academic performance (see Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji, 2019). See, e.g., Jürges and Schneider (2010) for further evidence that a tradeoff exists between learning and happiness.

10 Sweller (2016, p. 293).

students to practice with diligence and perseverance.11 The reason is that humans "have evolved to learn [biologically secondary information] from others."12 Since our ability to do so is a biologically primary skill that is lacking in most other animals, explicit instruction is considered by far the most natural and efficient teaching method.13 *Cognitive load theory* suggests that the alternative model for learning, in which novice students are expected to find and rehearse biologically secondary information themselves, leads to the working memory quickly becoming overloaded.14 As a result, one summary explains, "focus is lost, the mind wanders, and the task is abandoned."15 Disturbance of the working memory can, as was discussed in the previous chapter, also arise from perceived threats to safety, which is why the classical view of knowledge emphasizes the importance of structure and peace in the classroom for achieving successful learning outcomes, with the teacher as a social leader and norm setter.16

The terms knowledge and skills are deliberately combined in this account because, in the classical view, they are tightly interwoven. This belief is supported by research showing that skills, in fact, are dependent on domain-specific knowledge. As the U.S. educationalist E.D. Hirsch, an emblematic exponent of the classical view of knowledge, notes, "The domain specificity of skills is one of the firmest and most important determinations of current cognitive science."17 Even as basic a skill as reading comprehension requires domain knowledge, as has been demonstrated by studies showing that students who are considered "poor readers" on the basis of scores on reading tests outperform "good readers" in cases where the former happen to have more knowledge about the subject matter.18 Interestingly, from an equity point of view, this also remains true when IQ

11 See, e.g., Heckman and Rubenstein (2001) for a discussion of how such noncognitive skills facilitate the attainment of knowledge.

12 Sweller (2016, p. 300).

13 See further, e.g., Hattie (2009); Jerrim, Oliver, and Sims (2019); Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006); Mayer (2004).

14 Sweller, Ayres, and Kalyuga (2011).

15 Dehn (2014, p. 497).

16 Ingvar (2017). For more evidence, see, e.g., Lee, Lee, and Kim (2017).

17 Hirsch (2016, p. 13).

18 Recht and Leslie (1988).

is taken into account.19 The evidence thus suggests that anyone's reading comprehension will quickly degenerate when a topic is unfamiliar, regardless of the text's complexity.20 Consequently, it is logical that other, more advanced skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking, have also proven to require large amounts of domain-specific knowledge or even expertise in an area.21

Against this background, adherents of the classical view of knowledge reason that the key to developing cross-topic reading comprehension and other vital skills is having, in Hirsch's words, a "well-stocked mind."22 Hence, schools should offer students a broad curriculum. According to the classical view, such a curriculum should be organized around traditional subject areas. Moreover, it should be detailed and sequenced in a cumulative manner to ensure that students learn the foundations of a subject before proceeding to subsequent levels. The design of the curriculum is thus considered a critical success factor, and research corroborates this notion. A well-thought-out curriculum and high-quality teaching materials can, in fact, be even more important to student learning than teacher quality.23

What underlies the classical view of the curriculum is the idea that humanity through scientific inquiry has discovered and developed a body of knowledge about how the world is constituted and how it works that young students need to master, or at least have some basic understanding of, if they are to successfully live in that world. Such knowledge, for example, the rudimentary principles of physics and biology, is held to be objectively true, given the strength of the evidence in its favor that scientists have collected by observation and experimentation and by formulating and testing different hypotheses.24 By virtue of being true, in this sense, that body of knowledge has spread to the point that it has

19 Schneider, Körkel, and Weinert (1989).

20 Arya, Hiebert, and Pearson (2011).

21 For studies about problem solving, see, e.g., Larkin et al. (1980) and Simon and Chase (1973). For a discussion about critical thinking, see, e.g., Willingham (2010).

22 Hirsch (2016, p. 81).

23 See further Chingos and Whitehurst (2012); Whitehurst (2009).

24 See Okasha (2002) for a discussion about the philosophical concept of probability and the "logical interpretation of probability," which is congruent with the view of truth presented here.

become shared or, in Hirsch's term, "communal."25 It is, in other words, taken for granted that everyone has possession of it. Thus, to be ignorant of communal knowledge is to be an outsider unable to comprehend, build on, or challenge what others know. Therefore, schools must, according to the classical view, teach communal knowledge to every student.

Hannah Arendt crystallized this point in her 1954 essay "Crisis in Education" when she stated, "[Education] is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world."26 The same principle applies not just to the verifiable facts of the hard sciences and the tools invented to make use of them (e.g., mathematical methods) but also to communal knowledge that is enabling for the individual within the national context and essential to cultural identity, such as language grammar and other culturally shared concepts as well as literature, history, and geography. Even ethical concepts that the individual can rely on to make normative judgments are part of this communal knowledge. Without it, adherents of the classical view argue, students will not be able to fully take part in and help renew the society that they have been born into. As Arendt observed, "because [the world] continuously changes its inhabitants, it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants, it must be constantly set right anew."27 To fulfill this task, every new generation must be introduced to the knowledge of the old world.

The reader may be forgiven for thinking that this classical view of knowledge is widely accepted in educational systems throughout the world, but that is not so. Instead, a completely contradictory view of the nature of knowledge, pedagogy, and curricular principles has become much more influential in educational circles.

25 Hirsch (2016). 26 Arendt (1954 [2006], p. 193). 27 Arendt (1954 [2006], p. 191).

## The Contradictory View

This is the postmodern social constructivist view, to which we now turn our attention. Postmodernism as a philosophical movement can be understood as "a reaction to and rejection of modernity,"28 meaning, not least, its foundation in Enlightenment ideals such as reason and science.29 Postmodern theorists have, from the late 1960s onward, claimed that these ideals are not as reliable, valid, and unbiased as they may seem. On the contrary, they should be regarded as inevitably partial and highly subjective "metanarratives,"30 which, in their attempt to sweepingly explain the world, as postmodernism sees it, are comparable to normative "grand theories" such as Christianity or Marxism. The "knowledge" and "truths" that the purportedly scientific narratives have produced are, therefore, not truths at all but rather "dominant discourses" or "regimes of truth."31 In other words, they are nothing but hegemonic ways of speaking about things.

As the use of such terms suggests, postmodernism believes that what is regarded as known and true by modern, conventional standards is inextricably linked to power. Indeed, one of the most significant contributors to postmodern thought, Michel Foucault, explicitly preferred to refer to knowledge as "power-knowledge."32 The power in this context is perceived to be held and wielded by what postmodernism considers to be privileged cultures and groups, principally Western culture and white, heterosexual men.33 However, these groups exercise power not straightforwardly and visibly from above, postmodernism argues, but quite subtly and insidiously through language—through assertions of

28 Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020, p. 22; emphasis omitted).

29 In the following account of postmodernism, we rely heavily on Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020) and other secondary sources that attempt to summarize postmodern thought, albeit from a critical stance. This approach is necessary mostly because of postmodernism's notorious resistance to acknowledging itself as a coherent philosophy adhering to a distinct set of principles.

30 See further Lyotard ([1979] 1986).

32 Foucault (1980).

31 Foucault ([1970] 2002).

33 Lundberg (2020); Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020).

knowledge or through "expectations of civility and reasoned discourse, appeals to objective evidence, and even rules of grammar and syntax."34

Because of the indirect and nebulous character of this system of oppression, postmodern theorists claim that we all more or less unconsciously participate in and perpetuate it through our habits of speaking and thinking. Hence, according to postmodernists, the only way to escape and dismantle the system is to scrutinize and resist the language that is widely accepted as normal and to challenge or, in the French postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida's term, "deconstruct" favored discourses.35 A key aspect of this proposed "hermeneutics of suspicion"36 is the rejection of all established and generally acknowledged boundaries, categories, and hierarchies, which postmodernism regards not only as arbitrary and thus illegitimate but also as operating in the service of power.37

The epistemological basis for these beliefs is social constructivism. There are, we should note, different varieties of social constructivism.38 Indeed, as noted in a seminal article by the U.S. philosopher of education D.C. Phillips, social constructivism has "many faces,"39 but, for the sake of clarity, it is useful to distinguish broadly between two main versions: mild and radical social constructivism.40 The former version, for example, holds that many expressions of human thinking and behavior, such as language, gestures, and interpretations of different objects and phenomena, are collectively constructed and influenced by nonuniversal cultural factors.41 Radical social constructivism, on the other hand, goes so far as to deny our ability to reach objective truth, and it is this strand that informs—indeed, has merged with—postmodern theory.42

34 Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020, p. 36).

35 See, e.g., Derrida (1976).

36 Wållgren (2017, p. 69).

37 Hassan (1987); Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020).

38 Often the terms "social constructi*vism*" and "social constructi*onism*" are used interchangeably or are explicitly presented as synonymous. "Social constructivism" is allegedly the more widely familiar term (Hacking, 1999); therefore, we use it throughout the book.

39 Phillips (1995).

40 This is in keeping with the distinction offered by Linell (2006).

41 See, e.g., Berger and Luckmann (1966); Linell (2006).

42 Berger (1992); Elder-Vass (2012); Linell (2006).

In contrast to both its milder cousin and the classical view of knowledge, radical social constructivism does not believe that we can come to know how the world is, or most likely is, constituted through rational reasoning and the empirical, evidence-based scientific method. The reason is that radical social constructivism, at the very least, holds that truth claims cannot be measured against an objective reality because such a reality will always be unknowable due to our inherently partial perspectives. As one account of this radical epistemology explains, "The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other."43 However, other interpretations suggest that radical social constructivism is even more uncompromising than that, positing that objects and phenomena can, in fact, change depending on the ways in which we think and talk about them and how we choose to determine knowledge and truth.44 The conclusion is nevertheless the same, namely, that there are no real truths.

This reliance on radical social constructivist epistemology is what enables postmodernists to claim, as we have seen, that the quest to establish knowledge is nothing more than an attempt to further the power of dominant groups. It also explains why postmodernists argue that we should interrogate the shared language and concepts of society and subvert traditionally understood boundaries, such as the boundary between the objective and the subjective.45 Moreover, this radically social constructivist epistemological underpinning leads postmodernists to take a very specific view of teaching and education.

Perhaps the most elementary and important principle in this view is that the students themselves—not the teacher—should direct the learning process in the classroom. The reasoning is that because there are no objectively existing facts, there is no knowledge that can be legitimately transferred from teacher to student. Any attempt by a teacher to do so would, in effect, be an act of indoctrination and unwarranted social

43 Pluckrose and Lindsay (2020, p. 32).

44 Elder-Vass (2012); Linell (2006).

45 An emblematic example of this reasoning is provided by Hasso (1997, p. 15) in her dissertation on nationalism, feminism, and modernity in contemporary Palestine: "My research indicates that these socially constructed and subjective narratives are as important and 'real' as 'facts'."

control,46 as would any effort to correct children's mistakes or maintain a structured classroom environment conducive to learning in the classical sense.47 Similarly, because there is no way to objectively measure what students know, traditional assessment and grading practices are considered to be inherently judgmental and ideological.48

Instead, the postmodern social constructivist view of teaching holds, students must be free to determine their own knowledge and reality, building on personal life experiences rather than culturally prescribed truths, and find their own ways of studying and monitoring their progress. Students should, in this view, also be encouraged to independently deconstruct dominant discourses in different fields—science, history, art, etc.—through collaborative verbal discussions and the development of critical thinking. In contrast to the classical view, critical thinking is here regarded as a general skill that can be acquired, and indeed exercised, without possessing domain-specific knowledge, for instance, through comparing diverse sources of information, evaluating arguments, and exposing hidden agendas.49

It follows that the postmodern social constructivist view of teaching does not recognize the necessity of a detailed curriculum organized around traditional subject areas that every student is expected to learn in a particular order. On the contrary, all such curricula are considered biased and oppressive.50 Instead, students should be allowed to work with content that is personally meaningful and interesting to them. In other words, this view has little time for Hirsch's and Arendt's concept of "communal knowledge"; its focus is, perhaps not solely but primarily, on what the individual subjectively values. The postmodern social constructivist view does allow for a curriculum to be used. However, it should not be organized along subject lines and in a hierarchical, cumulative way but in line with postmodernism's emphasis on blurring boundaries—should

46 For instance, a popular postmodern textbook featured on many university education departments' reading lists, Kelly's *The Curriculum: Theory and Practice* (2004, p. 32), states that "one must see the imposition of any one version of knowledge as a form of social control and as a threat to all of the major freedoms identified as essential constituents of a free and democratic society."

47 See, e.g., Carnell (2000); Herr (2005).

48 Kelly (2004).

49 Wikforss (2019).

50 See, e.g., Kincheloe (2008); Kelly (2004).

rather aim to transgress and undermine the conventional demarcations between subjects and break down their internal structures.51

Ultimately, and to end this section, the postmodern social constructivist view is a complete negation of the classical view with which we began this chapter. In the next two chapters, we show how, step by step, it became the dominant thought style of the Swedish educational system, resulting in fundamental changes in teaching methods and the working conditions of schoolteachers.

## In Sum

In this chapter, we juxtapose two very different views of knowledge. According to what we call the classical view, the purpose of formal schooling is to give students the kind of valuable knowledge and skills, including relevant knowledge of the wider culture in which they are expected to spend their lives as adults, that they normally cannot acquire in any other way. Since the world a child is born into is so different from the one humankind has been exposed to in all but a tiny part of its evolutionary history, it is particularly important to provide students with the cognitive tools necessary to survive that differ the most from innate human intuitions, such as reading and writing ability and more advanced knowledge in, for example, economics, biology, and mathematical statistics.

The postmodern social constructivist view, on the other hand, rejects the existence of objective and neutral knowledge. Proponents of this view also tend to reject ordered thinking and the structure and hierarchy of knowledge within disciplines. In the context of schooling, this translates to, among other things, a rejection of the primacy of the teacher in the learning process and a preference for student-directed pedagogy, the mixing or breaking up of disciplines, and an emphasis on developing generic critical thinking rather than on acquiring domain-specific knowledge.

Proponents of both views believe, of course, that it is desirable for students to develop interpersonal skills, creativity, and critical thinking. The contentious issue is not whether such abilities are desirable per se but what means are most effective for acquiring them. Proponents of

51 Doll's (1993) concept of a chaotic, "dancing" curriculum is arguably one of the more pronounced expressions of this idea.

the classical view maintain that such skills are acquired by systematic and cumulative learning following a detailed and sequenced curriculum organized around traditional subject areas. Since the postmodernist social constructivist view rejects the structure imposed by such a detailed and sequenced curriculum, these desired abilities must be acquired through direct training decoupled from a systematic, knowledge-based curriculum.

Depending on which view of knowledge becomes institutionalized in a country's educational system, the system will either produce high-quality education or highly problematic learning conditions. This issue is further elaborated upon in the remainder of the book.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

The images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter's Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter's Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.

## The Rise of "Post-Truth" Schooling

We showed in Chapter 2 of this book that by the 1940s, Sweden had established a well-developed, high-quality system of education that attracted rising numbers of students to continue their schooling after the compulsory six-year primary stage. However, in the immediate postwar years, the very same educational system came under question, and steps were taken to have it dismantled and replaced by the nine-year so-called unity school, the *enhetsskola*.

As previously discussed, part of the reason for the change from the parallel system was the increasing strain on the theoretical intermediate school, the *realskola*. However, a factor of far greater import, as the present chapter shows, was a suspicion of classical education that was augmented by the experience of National Socialism in Germany. Because of misinterpretation of the National Socialists' educational aims and of pedagogical practices in Nazi German schools, it became widely believed among intellectuals and politicians that the traditional emphasis in Swedish schools on teacher authority and the individual's acquisition of shared knowledge (what E.D. Hirsch terms "communal knowledge"1) should be abandoned in favor of a radically student-centered model of education that emphasized student choice and critical thinking skills. The values that characterized the old educational order in Sweden were, in

1 Hirsch (1987, 2016).

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Henrekson and J. Wennström, *Dumbing Down*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3\_6

other words, rejected as obsolete or even undesirable, and a new school system was deemed necessary.

It is here, in Sweden's immediate postwar education policies, that we find the earliest antecedents of the postmodern social constructivist paradigm. While the ideas that fueled the reforms of the Swedish school system were adopted from the progressive pedagogical reform movement, there is, as we shall see, a remarkable continuity between those ideas and postmodern social constructivism. They may, in fact, be treated as one "thought style," in Ludwik Fleck's term,2 whose rise and progress over the decades, including its embrace by both the Left and the Right, are traced in this chapter to the point of its consolidation in the early 1990s. The next chapter then discusses its development in the twenty-first century and its hazardous integration with unfettered school competition between public schools and for-profit voucher schools.

## The End of Herbartian Education

As already noted at some length in Chapter 2, the school system that was introduced in Sweden during the 1860s was modeled largely on the German system and the pedagogical ideas of Johann Friedrich Herbart and his disciple Tuiskon Ziller. This system was built on a knowledgebased curriculum, student discipline (particularly self-discipline), and teacher authority. The fact that it was modeled along German lines was hardly surprising since Germany, then and long after, was Sweden's most important source of inspiration. Indeed, as the historian Johan Östling noted, "almost every cultural and social sphere in Sweden was shaped by German conditions" during the period from the mid-1800s until World War I.3

Over time, a broad political consensus emerged on the pedagogical aims and means of this German-inspired school system. The two successive education ministers during the 1930s and early 1940s, the prominent Social Democrat Artur Engberg and the Conservative Party leader Gösta Bagge, for example, both strongly supported Herbartian educational principles.4 Nevertheless, toward the end of and immediately after World War

2 Fleck (1979 [1935]). See Chapter 5 in this book.

3 Östling (2016, p. 236).

4 Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019, pp. 68–70).

II, the school system to which those principles had given rise was called into question and targeted for reform.

A crucial reason was the realization of the full extent of the Holocaust and related Nazi crimes, which led to a sudden stigmatization in Swedish public debate not only of all things German but also of conservative and traditionalist social attitudes.5 Even critical comments about the victory of modernism in literature and music were now considered beyond the pale. According to Östling's research, the reason was that National Socialism was interpreted in Sweden as a reactionary and authoritarian ideology "determined to crush the free and critical spirit" and an outgrowth of the conservative institutions and ideals that had dominated Germany before the Nazi era.6

The evidence provided by such scholarly observers of National Socialism as the political scientist Franz Neumann and the historian Timothy Snyder,7 as well as by the German conservative intellectual Hermann Rauschning, who broke with Nazism in its early years,8 suggests that National Socialism may be more aptly described as a revolutionary, almost anarchistic ideology that sought to dissolve conservative institutions (including, as Snyder argues, even the nation-state). However, in Sweden, a different analysis was influenced by what could arguably be called the deceptive superficial features of National Socialism, which quickly brought many previously influential and well-regarded beliefs, cultural personalities, and social institutions into disrepute—not least the school system, with its traditional teacher-centered pedagogy and educational virtues.9 The misgivings about the German-inherited school system were amplified by the fact that the National Socialists outwardly presented an image of their schools as strictly disciplined, harshly run by teachers, and ultimately a kind of continuation of the Herbartian educational order that had preceded Nazism.

In practice, the opposite was true. As demonstrated by the historian Daniel Horn, and in line with the characterization of National Socialism as a revolutionary movement, the Nazi leadership sought to undermine

5 Östling (2016, pp. 116–168).

9 For a longer discussion, see Heller Sahlgren and Wennström (2020).

the old educational order by tacitly approving a youth rebellion in schools that was led by the *Hitlerjugend* and was comparable to the nihilist behavior of the adolescent Red Guards during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.10 Indeed, soon after the National Socialist accession to power in 1933, students across Germany were rejecting the authority of their teachers and refusing to do the schoolwork assigned to them under the banner of *Hitlerjugend* slogans such as "Youth must be led by youth." The students' revolt "kept schools in perpetual turmoil, disrupted the educational process, undermined the status and prestige of the teachers, and brought about such a catastrophic decline in academic quality that it placed Germany in jeopardy of losing its technical and industrial preeminence."11

In reality, it did not matter to the Nazi leadership what happened to Germany's academic prowess. The political culture of National Socialism had a strong anti-intellectual slant, and Adolf Hitler himself "was filled with a juvenile contempt for all formal education and learning," which he termed "mere pumping of useless knowledge," as well as for the teaching profession, which he declared "fit only for incompetents and women."12 Official declarations that the future of Germany depended strongly on the quality of its educational institutions and that teachers were to tolerate no dissent from students were, in other words, mere window dressing for an entirely different purpose. Indeed, what was deemed important in Nazi Germany was inflaming generational tensions and directing the aggressive instincts of the young against the institutions and organizations of the old social structure with the ultimate goal of transferring children's loyalty from parents, teachers, and other natural authority figures to the National Socialist movement.13

The National Socialists' efforts to win the hearts and minds of the young were successful. As, for instance, the historian Mary Fulbrook noted, German youth displayed an exceptional degree of fanaticism, whereas many adults "seem to have simply withdrawn into a more-orless sullen silence."14 It was predominantly also young men and women

 Horn (1976). Horn (1976, p. 426). Horn (1976, p. 426). Horn (1976). Fulbrook (2011, p. 138). who—after many of them had first learned to transgress moral boundaries in Germany's rebellious classrooms—both carried out the November 9th pogrom in 1938 and other acts of street violence in German cities during the prewar years and perpetrated the mass shootings and guarded the concentration camps in eastern Europe during the Holocaust.15

Education in Nazi Germany, as it actually existed in practice, was thus far removed from the Herbartian educational tradition. If National Socialism and its crimes had any pedagogical underpinning at all, it was so-called war pedagogy (*Kriegspädagogik*), which disrupted the established pedagogical practices of many primary and secondary schools in Germany during the period 1914–1918 and aimed to turn students into avid supporters of the German effort in World War I.

Despite its militaristic name, war pedagogy favored "active, childcentered methods," which were found to "amplify the students' zeal for the war by engaging students more personally and bringing the present into the classroom"16 and encourage children's natural aggressive traits.17 Importantly, exposure to this amalgamation of permissive, child-centered approaches and "intense nationalism" has been highlighted in historical research as a key explanation for why young men, particularly of the birth cohorts 1900–1908 (school age during the war), were overwhelmingly present in various proto-Nazi organizations and the Nazi Party itself before 1933 and why many of them (e.g., Martin Bormann, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Himmler, Rudolf Höss, and the Hitlerjugend leader Baldur von Schirach) later became leading figures in the Third Reich.18

However, in Sweden, many believed that the school practices of the Third Reich were closely related to those of the old educational order in Germany and thus indirectly also to practices in Sweden at the time.19 The Swedish school system was consequently brought into what Johan Östling calls a "Nazi sphere of association,"20 the reach of which was, in actuality, based more on perception than on fact. The hit movie *Torment*, mentioned previously in Chapter 2, suggested, for example, that Swedish

15 Fulbrook (2011); Lower (2013); Rich (2018).

16 Donson (2006, p. 342).

17 Kay (2014).

18 Donson (2006); Donson (2010, pp. 60–61).

19 Heller Sahlgren and Wennström (2020).

20 Östling (2016, p. 128).

schoolteachers were influenced by the Nazis,21 although teachers were in fact largely immune to Nazi propaganda and teacher organizations rejected National Socialism as a creed.22

More generally, as we showed before, the Swedish school system was inherently different both from the official image of Nazi Germany's schools as bastions of authoritarian repression and from the disorderly reality. Importantly, the underlying pedagogical philosophy of the modern Swedish school system, Herbartianism, was an individualist one that valued knowledge as a road to character building and envisioned the teacher-student relationship as humane and akin to that of apprentice and master. Nonetheless, a connection was made between National Socialist education and the practices of Swedish schools, providing a tremendous impetus for school reform plans. Certainly, the movement in favor of such plans and its ideas, which rejected the "European *Bildung* tradition" and were instead heavily influenced by the progressive child-centered pedagogy of the U.S. educator John Dewey and the Austrian psychologist Elsa Köhler as well as by Rousseau's idealistic view of children, predated the Third Reich.23 However, the controversy surrounding the mistaken educational lessons drawn from National Socialism created both a political opportunity structure that could be exploited to realize those ideas in practice and a strong sense of urgency regarding the mission of the movement.

Indeed, while the parallel schooling system had long been criticized, "virtually all the contributions to the debate about the problems of education in the post-war period made reference to totalitarian experience, above all to the experience of Nazism."24 The need for a new kind of school was now perceived as overwhelming by leading intellectuals of the era, among others the sociologist Alva Myrdal, an influential thinker in the Social Democratic Party. Together with her husband, the prominent economist Gunnar Myrdal, she had spent time in America during the late 1930s and early 1940s and been greatly influenced by Dewey's work and

21 Almgren (2019, p. 282).

22 Almgren (2019); Höjeberg (2016).

23 See Carlgren et al. (2006, p. 302); Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019); Richardson (1978).

24 Östling (2016, p. 190).

by progressive pedagogy in general.25 These intellectuals wanted to make a wholesale break with the past and move toward a more "democratic" form of education, no longer aiming to produce individuals who, in the reformers' eyes, were ready to blindly follow orders from teachers and other authority figures but instead to develop a free and critical personality in children and adolescents.

Along with other prominent Social Democrats, Myrdal was appointed in 1946 to a parliamentary commission set up to reshape the course of Swedish education. It was the Schools Commission that proposed, in its final report, published in 1948, the creation of the unity school, in which all students would be taught together for nine years. Myrdal authored the rough sketch of this proposal more or less on her own.26 The Schools Commission was highly critical of the existing system: It harshly denounced prevailing pedagogical methods, calling the practice of teacher-led instruction "authoritarian to its core,"27 and turned against the educational content. Traditional humanistic subjects, for instance, were said to be concerned with "dead matter that lacked significance both to an understanding of cultural development at large and to a better understanding of the problems of our own age."28

The Schools Commission's final report represented a complete turnaround from and rebuttal of Herbartian educational principles. Indeed, in the proposed unity school system, teachers were to step back from their traditional role as knowledgeable authority figures charged with leading the work carried out in the classroom. The Schools Commission instead wanted to "promote students' independence and critical thinking, their will to work and to work independently, their sociality and capacity to co-operate" and allow "students to develop activities and initiatives themselves."29 Moreover, anticipating the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge that was to emerge later, the Schools

29 SOU 1948:27 (p. 5).

25 On the influence of Dewey on both Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, see, e.g., Jackson (1990, pp. 105–106).

26 Hederberg (2004).

27 SOU 1948:27 (p. 5).

28 SOU 1948:27 (p. 30).

Commission called for a curriculum that was grounded in students' everyday experiences and a reduced common core of learning, arguing that it was "increasingly obvious how seldom acquired knowledge can be considered fixed"30 and that systematic and rigorous learning inspires obedience and submission.31

According to Stellan Arvidson, another influential member of the 1946 Schools Commission, the proposed new school system would instead, in line with Deweyan educational philosophy, offer a more "natural" education, catering to the particular interests and personality of each child. The students would henceforth, Arvidson wrote in 1958, "*not* be trained in the art of writing traditional essays, *not* be trained in writing grammatically correctly in foreign languages, *not* be exposed to traditional numerical assignments."32 The Schools Commission's final report contained similar language, stressing that "the individuality of the student" should always be "the starting-point of … education."33 The formulation reflected not just the legitimate view that students' level of maturity should be considered but also that respect should be shown for the feelings of the individual student and his or her degree of interest in the schoolwork and that collective educational norms and practices should be eliminated.34 Indeed, as Arvidson later explained, the ideal was that 30 children in a classroom would study from 30 different curricula.35

What had happened that could produce such a sea change in education policy in just a few years? A key part of the answer is, as discussed above, the erroneous association between the crimes of Nazism and the kind of teacher-led instruction on which the established Swedish school system was based. As the Schools Commission's first chair, Education Minister (later Prime Minister) Tage Erlander, wrote in his memoirs, "We had during the years of Nazi rule in Europe become aware that one of the most important tasks of the school system is to educate people so that

30 SOU 1948:27 (p. 148).

31 Östling (2016).

they … do not become blind to what is happening in society. The school system must provide youths … with a sense of participation in the shaping of society. … If so, schools cannot at the same time be organized in an authoritarian fashion."36

## The Unity School

Compelling evidence that the unity school system proposed by the 1946 Schools Commission would not be as conducive to learning as the incumbent system became apparent during the trial period ordered by the Social Democratic government in the 1950s. The Swedish National Board of Education was at this time commissioned to administer tests comparing knowledge levels in 8th grade in trial schools to the corresponding class in the *realskola*. 37 Twelve such tests were given in 1954, and the *realskola* students performed significantly better than students in the trial schools in all of them. For instance, "in 1954, the students in 9g, the unity school class for continuing to high school, were given the English exam for the *realskola*. Overall, 61.5 percent of the boys and 53.3 percent of the girls failed the exam, compared to 6–7 percent of the students in the *realskola*."38

Here, it is worth mentioning that the trial schools were given the option of differentiating students according to ability in 7th and 8th grades and splitting them into three streams in the ninth and final year: (i) an academic stream to prepare them for high school, ending in an exit exam; (ii) a general stream; and (iii) a vocational stream containing 22 hours per week of vocational training of various orientations. Contrary to government expectations, almost all trial schools chose this option.39 Indeed, "[t]he only exceptions were schools that were so small that they had too few students to be able to [split them into] separate classes."40 Thus, the students in 9g who took the English exam referred to above

36 Erlander (1973, p. 237).

37 This was the so-called Stockholm Study led by Torsten Husén at the Stockholm Institute of Education. The main results of the study were presented in Svensson (1962).

38 Lidström (2015, p. 105).

39 The shares of trial schools that utilized the option to differentiate in 7th and 8th grades were 93 and 97 percent, respectively. See Hadenius (1990, pp. 119–120).

40 Lidström (2015, p. 105).

were, in fact, streamed. This suggests that if all students had truly been taught together, the results on the exam would have been even worse,41 that the pedagogy of the old *realskola* was superior in promoting learning, and that its selective nature does not fully explain its success.

Moreover, it was not certain that the planned unity school system would be able to meet its ambitious social goals. Two leading psychology researchers, Ingvar Johannesson and David Magnusson, were commissioned to examine whether the abolition of streaming into different school forms would turn students into better collaborators. As stated in the final report of the 1946 Schools Commission, this was an important aim of the unity school reform. Since almost no trial school decided to refrain from differentiation and streaming, this hypothesis could not be properly tested, but in their comprehensive survey of international experiences, Johannesson and Magnusson were unable to find any evidence that teaching all students together would improve their ability to collaborate and interact socially with each other.42

The trials were discontinued prematurely, and the publication of the unfavorable results was postponed until 1962, when the final decision to introduce the unity school had already been made by parliament. Moreover, when the results of the knowledge tests and the psychological study were eventually published, they were "interpreted in a misleading way in favor of the unitary organization."43 Thus, ultimately, it did not matter to the school reformers that the proposed new school system had significant academic deficiencies compared to the old system or that their social ambitions were not grounded in evidence. What ultimately mattered was that the ideas presented by the 1946 Schools Commission were given full sway, which is also what happened.

Indeed, the first two national curricula of the new system advanced practically the same ideas about the purpose of schooling. For example, while students in the Herbartian philosophy were believed to mature through the self-disciplined study of domain-specific knowledge, the 1962 curriculum indicated that such traditional teaching was at risk of being dull, stultifying, or even antidemocratic. The curriculum instead stressed that schools "should work from norms that the students accept

41 See Hadenius (1990, p. 124); Lidström (2015, p. 105).

42 Hadenius (1990, pp. 163–166).

43 Hadenius (1990, p. 170).

and rules that they help to develop."44 The second national curriculum, enacted in 1969, even more explicitly emphasized that teacher-led instruction and the imparting of knowledge were of less importance than stimulating students' active role in the learning process.45 All terms associated with classical knowledge-based schooling, such as "culture" and "education," were consequently removed from the curriculum by the Ministry of Education.46

Additionally, and in line with the then emerging postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge, the 1969 curriculum called for a breakup of the structure and hierarchy of the traditional subject disciplines, suggesting that any subject "could for some students be given a more concrete and practical content, while other students could study the subject on a more theoretical level."47 The curriculum explicitly stated that it was not necessary for all students to study all parts of subjects. Moreover, all types of knowledge measurement were discouraged: "If one only measures the easily measurable, the goal of the school system will once again be reduced to simple cognitive memory functions … and cramming of facts."48

The new direction for Sweden's schools caused significant dissatisfaction within the teaching community. As early as the start of the 1970s, many teachers (including 49 percent of those in the upper grades of elementary school) wanted to leave the profession.49 The root of their dissatisfaction was the new role envisioned for teachers in the unity school system, which was a far cry from the old teacher ethos. Indeed, as discussed in Chapter 2, Swedish schoolteachers were traditionally motivated by a professional ethos built around imparting knowledge and virtues such as engagement and self-sacrifice to new generations. However, they were now told that teachers were no longer considered necessary in their long-standing function as persons knowledgeable in their subject matter. This message to teachers was crystallized in a report

44 Swedish National Board of Education (1962, p. 13).

45 See Swedish National Board of Education (1969).

46 Hadenius (1990, p. 228).

47 Swedish National Board of Education (1969, p. 44).

48 Swedish National Board of Education (1969, p. 73).

49 Wennström (2014, p. 48).

submitted by Alva Myrdal to the 1969 Social Democratic Party congress, a de facto government document, which declared50:

The role of the teacher is undergoing a material change. … The teacher's primary task will not be to act as an authority in his or her field, but to be an inspirer and coach to the students and gradually try to broaden their fields of interest.

The aim during the 1970s was, in fact, to create an exchangeable "comprehensive teacher" who, instead of specializing in particular subjects, could work in all classes and at all grade levels.51

However, it was not just the teachers' commitment to knowledge that was being refuted; the very idea of teachers being guided by a professional ethos, which had been at the heart of teacher training during the "silver age" of Swedish education, was soon also being questioned. Starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the 1980s, the Social Democrats, in tandem with the trade and labor union movement, challenged the notions of vocation, personal responsibility, and self-sacrifice in public-sector professions such as teaching and instead emphasized extrinsic rewards and rights. Teaching was to be considered not as a vocation but as an ordinary job, the Social Democrats argued.52 Incidentally, similar views were advanced by the liberal-conservative Moderate Party and others on the free-market Right, who claimed that the behavior of public servants, such as teachers, is always motivated by self-interest.53 (This belief would play an important role in the effort to marketize Swedish education, an issue that we deal with at some length in the next chapter.)

Nevertheless, although the values that were important to many teachers were undermined, a sufficient number of teachers of the old tradition remained in the unity school so that, in practice, the methods used in Swedish classrooms changed only marginally during the first

50 Myrdal (1969, p. 69).

decades of the new system.54 The traditional organizational culture of the National Board of Education, the public agency that was expected to implement the Social Democratic school policies, also proved hard to reconcile with the reforms, which was another contributing factor to the Social Democrats' failure to redirect the inner workings of schools.55

The Social Democrats acknowledged this state of affairs in a government bill56:

Changing the methods of education … had been a significantly harder task than changing the [politically decided] framework. Such change takes time because it is in part a question of the staff's positive attitude. … Introducing new methods in the daily schoolwork means that a long tradition that is often perceived as self-evident and thereby almost value neutral is pitted against new ideas and innovations.

Addressing the 1975 Social Democratic Party congress, Minister of Schools Lena Hjelm-Wallén also said that "we are forced to acknowledge that today's schools to a large extent are characterized by the classical imparting of knowledge, which has been inherited from school system to school system and fashioned on values from a society completely different from ours."57 Alva Myrdal more bluntly stated that the older generations of teachers had to be phased out before the desired changes to the school system could take effect.58

The same frustration with the slow development of the school system existed on the political Right at the start of the 1980s. The then Center-Right government bill that proposed the third national curriculum in 1980 harshly criticized the existing differentiation between subjects, arguing that the natural sciences and technical subjects "cannot be isolated from the social sciences" and that "traditionally structured

54 Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019); Rothstein (2010 [1986]). For a longer discussion of how organizational culture may impede reform efforts, see, e.g., Pollitt (2008) and Wilson (2000 [1989]).

55 Rothstein (2010 [1986]).

56 Government Bill (1975/76:39, p. 220).

57 Rothstein (2010 [1986], p. 114).

58 Ohrlander (1981).

content" in physics and chemistry should be abandoned.59 It disapprovingly observed that much "educational material [in physics and chemistry] still has a troubling subject-focus, a narrow perspective and a high level of abstraction."60 The bill also stated that "the well-structured mass of knowledge that has accumulated within different traditional subjects can never be a starting point for schoolwork."61

Such formulations marked a significant advance from 1940s progressivism toward a more clearly expressed postmodern social constructivist thought style. Indeed, the bill called for schoolwork to reflect "the students' view of reality," which it claimed is inherently different from adults' perception of reality, and "build on their curiosity and their questions."62 The 1980 curriculum itself stated that both the content of education and the teaching methods used should be adapted to each student based on his or her interests since there is "no way of studying that is best for all students."63 The fact that the Right had by now embraced the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge may seem surprising but was, in fact, consistent with the modern Right's individualistic model of education, in which every student would be allowed to forge his or her own path in school.64

At the beginning of the 1990s, reality in schools began to align itself with the wishes of reformers on both the Left and the Right. Almost all older teachers had by then retired and were replaced by a new generation of teachers who had been trained in the postmodern social constructivist ideas that prevail in modern teacher-training institutions in Sweden.65 In these institutions, the practices of older teachers were explicitly criticized, and no concrete training in how to instruct students was given.66

59 Government Bill (1978/79:180, p. 76).

60 Government Bill (1978/79:180, p. 76).

61 Government Bill (1978/79:180, p. 80).

62 Government Bill (1978/79:180, p. 80).

63 Swedish National Board of Education (1980, p. 52).

64 See Hylén (1991). Recent research suggests that postmodernism and neoliberalism may be more compatible than has previously been imagined. Dean and Zamora (2021) demonstrate that Michel Foucault himself embraced the neoliberal wave of the 1970s and market governance as a means of individual emancipation.

65 See Fiévet and Henrekson (2017).

66 See Linderoth (2016).

Indeed, according to an analysis in the newspaper *Dagens Nyheter*, the "displacement of teachers trained before the 1970s should have peaked around 1990."67 Moreover, "student influence" was for the first time enshrined in law.68 The Social Democrats also abolished the old National Board of Education and replaced it with the Swedish National Agency for Education, which, in contrast to the previous agency, was staffed by Social Democrats69 and by pedagogues influenced by postmodern social constructivist ideas.70 The Center-Right government led by the Moderate Party that had come to power in 1991 then enacted a fourth curriculum in 1994 that adopted an even more explicit postmodern social constructivist view of schooling.71

## The 1994 National Curriculum

At least two factors made the 1994 curriculum stand out from its predecessors. First, the curriculum did not include prescribed content to be covered in the form of detailed course syllabi; it merely established a number of goals and objectives that it expected schools to concretize at the local level. Despite the ideological intentions of the previous curricula, they had stipulated in detail how teaching time should be allocated across different subjects and spelled out the course syllabi.72 However, in the 1994 curriculum, such detailed instructions were removed. One set of goals consisted of general aims that "schools should strive for," mostly emphasizing the facilitation of critical thinking and self-directed learning and the development of personal opinions, while another set of goals was content-specific for the individual student.73 Both sets of goals were nonspecific and open to interpretation. Some content-specific

67 Dagens Nyheter (2015, p. 6).

72 Enkvist (2016, p. 62) notes that the 1962 curriculum in this sense was "a text characterized by both the old and the new." She also notes that the 1969 curriculum provided a detailed commentary for each subject "written by experts in the field that often conveys enthusiasm for subject learning" (p. 69). This likely contributed to the limited impact of the reforms on classroom practice.

73 Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, pp. 9–10).

goals included "masters basic mathematical thinking and can apply it in everyday life"; "is familiar with and comprehends basic terms and concepts within the natural science, technical, social science, and humanities knowledge fields"; and "has deepened knowledge within a few subject areas of his/her choosing."

The second important feature of the 1994 curriculum and a precondition of the first feature was that the curriculum was based on an explicitly postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge. In 1991, a committee consisting mostly of pedagogues and staff from the Ministry of Education was tasked with drafting the curriculum. Its final report, "a key text for anyone wishing to understand the development of the Swedish school system since the 1990s,"74 emphasized what it considered to be the constructive and subjective nature of knowledge. The report stated, "[W]hat is knowledge in one place is not necessarily knowledge in other places. … In different kinds of societies, the content and form of knowledge are different."75 The report also claimed that "there are no 'pure' facts," only facts that take on meaning from what can be seen or detected.76 This view of knowledge was summarized as follows77:

Theoretical knowledge is not a "reflection" of the world, but a human construction to make the world manageable and comprehensible. *Knowledge is hence not true or untrue but something that can be argued for and appraised*. Knowledge is up for discussion. To establish such a view of knowledge among the students, it is stated in the curriculum that *the subjects should be given a historical dimension*. This means that knowledge should not merely be taught as set answers, free from a specific historical context, but as answers that have come about in specific contexts under specific circumstances and in specific ways.

In line with these arguments, the report suggested that the "selection of facts can vary locally" and that "not all students everywhere need to work with the same facts to reach a common understanding."78 It recommended that schools not structure the content of education

 Linderoth (2016, p. 49). SOU (1992:94, p. 63). SOU (1992:94, p. 65). SOU (1992:94, p. 76; emphasis in original). SOU (1992:94, p. 77).

into different subjects in the early grades but focus initially on sparking students' curiosity and use "the children's questions" as a starting point.79 Indeed, what was deemed most important in schools was facilitating "knowledge-creating" (*kunskapande*), which appears to be a term for the idea of students as participants in a collaborative enterprise of constructing knowledge. The report stressed that an integral part of schooling was allowing students to become involved in "the processes that [knowledge] is an outcome of"80 and insisted on the centrality of theorization and verbal communication: "Students need to be allowed to discuss a lot, be trained in expressing and formulating their views and appraising different arguments."81 An illustrative example was provided in a discussion on including the "students' media world, their knowledge, and media interest" in the content of education, in which it was suggested that students should "learn to 'deconstruct' the media, their messages, and their way of working."82

The 1994 curriculum was the first Swedish national curriculum to include a discussion on the concept of knowledge.83 It stated84:

The task of the school system to impart knowledge presupposes an active discussion in the individual school about knowledge concepts, what constitutes important knowledge today and in the future, and how knowledge develops. Different aspects of knowledge are natural starting points for such a discussion.

Knowledge is not an unambiguous concept. Knowledge is expressed in different forms … which presuppose and interact with each other. Schoolwork must focus on giving room for different forms of knowledge and learning in which these forms are balanced and become a whole for the individual student.

The curriculum also emphasized that students should assume successively greater responsibility for their own learning85:

 SOU (1992:94, p. 79). SOU (1992:94, p. 67). SOU (1992:94, p. 68). SOU (1992:94, p. 98). Wikforss (2017, 2019). Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, p. 8). Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, pp. 6–7). The structure of the learning environment shall be characterized by democratically determined learning processes and prepare students for active participation in civic life. It shall develop their ability to take personal responsibility. By choosing courses and subjects and by taking part in the planning and evaluation of their daily learning, students will develop their ability to exercise influence and take responsibility.

Ensuring that students were given greater responsibility for and influence over the planning and content of their education was proclaimed to be the teacher's main priority. The teacher should "assume that students are able and want to assume personal responsibility for their learning and their schoolwork."86 In fact, the teacher's official responsibilities were all concerned in one way or another with supporting self-directed learning and creating a democratic classroom environment. It is striking and indicative of the document's stance with regard to knowledge—that there are no statements to the effect that the teacher was expected to impart domain-specific knowledge to the students.87 At the same time, training students in diligence, perseverance, and other noncognitive skills, which would at least have increased their chances of working successfully without instruction, was abandoned.88

Thus, the 1994 curriculum transferred the responsibility for determining the content of and methods for elementary and secondary education from the state to individual schools and their students. This change was motivated in part by a sweeping reform to decentralize the management of education from the state to the municipalities and in part by the effort to marketize the Swedish educational system (we discuss both in the next chapter). However, the change was also due to the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge as subjective and locally constructed that was expressed in the final report of the curriculum committee and had come to be widely shared in society. Looking back at the 1990s in 2003, the Swedish National Agency for Education confirmed that the generally held belief in "government, municipal, and union circles" was that "knowledge cannot be imparted by one individual to another, by the one who is teaching to the one who is learning."89

86 Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, p. 14).

87 See Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, pp. 12–14).

88 Hörnqvist (2012).

89 Swedish National Agency for Education (2003, p. 27).

In contrast to what had happened when new national curricula had been introduced in previous decades, the teaching methods used in Swedish schools gradually changed. A 2003 survey asking 9th graders how often they worked individually without instruction in school found that 50 percent did so several times a day, up from 25 percent in the early 1990s.90 In mathematics, 79 percent of students reported doing so during every or almost every lesson. What emerged from these findings, according to the Swedish National Agency for Education, was an "image of an increasingly isolated and individualized education, in which students are working in isolation from both the teacher and the other schoolchildren."91

This view was later corroborated by international comparative surveys. For example, the 2007 TIMSS report showed that Swedish 8th graders spent more time working individually, without teacher instruction, during mathematics lessons than students in any other participating country. Similar results were reported in both the 2011 and 2015 TIMSS studies.92 Moreover, according to the 2012 PISA study, Sweden had the second most student-led learning practices in mathematics in the entire OECD area. In the 2015 PISA study, Sweden also occupied a shared second place among countries with the most discovery-based learning practices in science.93

In tandem with the 1994 curriculum, a new grading system was enacted. In the previous relative grading system, in which students were "awarded a grade from 1 to 5, on a scale representing the overall achievement in the country,"94 teachers were required to justify in writing why they wanted to assign grades that diverged greatly from the results of standardized tests.95 These standardized tests were developed to help schools "with the scale calibration, i.e., with placing their classes and students on the scale that represented the entire population."96 However, one of the defining features of the new system was that it eliminated the anchoring

90 Swedish National Agency for Education (2004a).

91 Swedish National Agency for Education (2004a, p. 47).

92 Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019, p. 93).

93 Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019, pp. 94–95).

function of centrally administered standardized test scores and gave individual teachers full autonomy to assign grades. Teachers were, in turn, instructed to "utilize all available information about the student's knowledge" and arrive at "an all-around judgment" when assigning grades rather than focusing only on test results and other traditional forms of assessment.97 Schools were also required to consider the curriculum's goal that the students should "develop the ability to evaluate their results and relate their own and others' judgment to their performance and inherent capacity," which implied some degree of student influence over grading.98 Heavily influenced by the postmodern social constructivist view that objectively measurable knowledge does not exist,99 these grading instructions opened the door for arbitrary grading decisions and complaints about bad grades that could be easily dismissed as subjectively determined, leading to de facto negotiations between teachers and students or the emergence of a "didactic conspiracy."100

These were hazardous conditions for competition between public schools and for-profit voucher schools, which had come into existence just a few years earlier through Sweden's school choice reform (enacted in 1992–1993). With these changes to the curriculum and the grading system, there were no longer any institutional barriers to competition in dimensions other than educational quality, including grading. As we show in the coming chapters, independent schools seem to have quickly taken advantage of this opportunity.

## In Sum

This chapter examines the history and development of the Swedish school system from approximately 1945 to the mid-1990s. Shortly after

97 Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, p. 16).

98 Swedish National Agency for Education (1994, p. 16).

99 According to the Swedish National Agency for Education (1996, p. 35), the old grading system was "characterized by the belief that it is possible to objectively measure knowledge." However, "ideas about the scientifically based and the 'objective' and the idea that all students are 'expected to learn the same things'" were not, in the view of the Agency, in harmony with the new educational system.

100 "Didactic conspiracy" refers to a phenomenon of teachers coming to an unspoken understanding with their students to not rigorously assess the students' knowledge. In exchange, the teachers do not have to face criticism from their students (see Alexandersson, 2005; Linderoth, 2016).

the end of World War II, the Swedish government launched a Schools Commission with the objective of suggesting a major reform of the national educational system. In its final report, the commission rejected the Herbartian educational principles on which the current system was founded. Instead, it advocated a student-centered pedagogy in which the teacher was relegated from the role of knowledgeable pedagogical leader to that of mentor and enabler of the students' largely individual learning processes.

The proposals met with strong resistance from teachers. Trials conducted during the 1950s also suggested that the proposed new school system would lead to dramatic declines in knowledge results. Nevertheless, the commission's program was gradually instituted. A major motivation was the influence on policymakers of progressive educational philosophy, which evolved into a postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge and teaching. This development became consolidated with the advent of the 1994 curriculum.

Many of the notions that are emblematic of the postmodern social constructivist view (discussed in Chapter 5) are explicitly or implicitly expressed in the curriculum. For example, it suggested that there are no objectively established facts and that what is legitimized as knowledge is a product of social and historical forces. Moreover, the curriculum recommended mixing or breaking up academic subjects, incorporating "deconstruction" into schoolwork, and giving students the major responsibility for the planning and content of their education. As the next chapter shows, we can detect an equally pronounced postmodern social constructivist influence in the curriculum from 2011, which was in effect throughout the 2010s and was still operative in a slightly modified form at the time of writing in early 2021.

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# The Deinstitutionalization and Fragmentation of the Swedish School System

We showed in the previous chapter how the view of knowledge in the Swedish school system radically changed between the end of World War II and the early 1990s. Through the successive reform of national curricula, the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge was established as the dominant thought style. We continue exploring that subject in this chapter, demonstrating that in practice, nothing has changed in recent years. We begin by showing how profound structural changes to the school system have exacerbated the already hazardous incentives created by the stipulated view of knowledge. The analysis of those incentives is mostly left to the penultimate chapter; here, we describe the recent sea change that has occurred in the organization of Swedish education.

Broadly speaking, it is possible to distinguish between three different periods in elementary and secondary education in Sweden, the first of which started with the Elementary School Act of 1842.1 At that time, local parish administrations were given the responsibility to provide elementary schooling to the Swedish population. Most secondary education institutions were also connected to the Church. Starting at the turn of the century, however, the state strengthened its presence in elementary and secondary schooling, initiating a prolonged period of education centralization in Sweden.

1 Skott (2015).

© The Author(s) 2022 M. Henrekson and J. Wennström, *Dumbing Down*, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3\_7

In 1919, as previously explained, the first truly national curriculum was introduced, and in 1920, a central school authority, the Swedish National Board of Education, was established and given responsibility for both mandatory elementary school and college-preparatory school (later extended to include all secondary schooling). Although the management of schools still occurred at the local level, central government regulations grew increasingly binding, and earmarked intergovernmental transfers constituted an increasing share of school financing.2

The enactment of the unity school, the *enhetsskola*, in the early 1960s meant not only that all children studied together for nine years but also that the state (the central government, parliament, and relevant government agencies) was attempting to assume total control over the form and content of the Swedish school system.

The Swedish National Board of Education had 24 regional branches commissioned to oversee school management. This included the recruitment of teachers, principals, and deputy principals based on strict government rules regarding merit and salaries and ensuring that all schools in their jurisdiction adhered to the detailed, centrally determined course syllabi and times allocated to the different subjects.

In order to receive the intergovernmental transfers, every school had to submit a detailed report of its activities to the regional agency, which had the right to make unannounced inspections of individual schools at will. Moreover, a government agency reviewed and approved all textbooks to ensure correspondence between the centrally determined course syllabi and the teaching material,3 and a national relative grading system was calibrated at the class level using standardized test results.

By 1970, the centralization project was completed, and the school system was de facto managed by the state, which tightly controlled the structure and content of education as well as the salaries and competence requirements of teachers and principals. With the exception of those students attending a select handful of independent schools,4 all Swedish children between the ages of 7 and 16 went through exactly

2 Lindbom (1995); SOU 2014:5, pp. 47–48.

3 Over the years different agencies fulfilled this role, and their responsibilities varied somewhat (Johnsson Harrie, 2009).

4 Less than one percent attended independent schools (Jordahl and Öhrvall, 2013), which essentially taught the children of the wealthiest families or had alternative pedagogic profiles; these schools were only partially supported by funds from the state.

the same school system (the only variation was the option to study English, mathematics, and either French or German at a somewhat more advanced level in grades 7–9 and the possibility to opt out of studying a second foreign language). Likewise, secondary school was basically identical everywhere, with a number of two-year vocational programs and five three-year college-preparatory programs (students in technology programs had the option of adding a fourth year to obtain a lower-level engineering diploma).

This system remained largely unchanged until the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a number of far-reaching reforms were instituted by governments on both sides of the ideological spectrum, shifting the system into the third and present period of decentralization and marketization. In the course of just a few years, the school system went from being arguably the most regulated in the entire OECD to being the polar opposite.5

## Governance Transferred to Municipalities

In 1989, the Social Democratic government passed the so-called Governance Bill,6 which reduced the role of the central government in education to merely setting general goals and objectives while transferring the responsibility for primary and secondary schooling to the municipalities. It had been a long-term goal of the Social Democrats since the 1970s to move the democratic governance of the welfare state down to the municipal level—"close to the citizens"—and in the late 1980s, this ambition harmonized with the *zeitgeist*. 7 One example is the trend toward decentralization and management by objectives that swept through public administration in Sweden and the West more broadly. Another is the critique leveled by both the Right and a neoliberalized Left at perceived bureaucratic rigidities, limited individual choice, and financial waste in the centralized public sector. Increasingly the Social Democrats had come under the sway of such complaints and sensed that something had to be done to reform the strong state.

In the area of education these disparate political priorities were consolidated in a more or less complete decentralization and deregulation of

5 SOU 2014:5, p. 57.

6 Government Bill 1988/89:4.

7 Ringarp (2011, p. 194).

the school system, which only began with the transfer of administration and management of all public schools to Sweden's 290 municipalities.8 Effective from 1991, teachers and school principals became municipal employees, and the strict merit and experience-based salary schedules were abandoned and replaced by individually negotiated salaries. Other previous regulations on teaching were also repealed; for example, subjectspecific academic qualifications were no longer required for teachers.9 Teaching became more of a regular job, in line with new public management (NPM) reform ideas.10 Moreover, intergovernmental transfers were no longer tied to adherence to detailed rules regarding staffing, syllabi content, or the time allocated to the different subjects. Instead, each municipality received a lump sum from the central government based on the number of inhabitants aged 6–20 years, and this money could also be spent on other municipal activities.

At the same time, the old National Board of Education, which was viewed as an obstacle to the realization of a new, deregulated, and decentralized education system and contrary to social democratic education policies in general,11 was abolished and replaced by the National Agency for Education. However, the agency was not primarily a regulatory agency. In fact, the new agency defined itself in opposition to the abolished National Board of Education and pledged to "dismantle traditional supervision and control."12 Its managers expressed a direct disregard for the institutional memory of the previous organization and its first director general, Ulf P. Lundgren, publicly voiced fears that the former board's "bureaucracy was stuck to the walls" of the newly created agency.13