Where did Swedish schooling go wrong? | Hacker News Reader

Where did Swedish schooling go wrong?

marginalrevolution.com

42 pointswslh10 comments

Johan Wennström, one of the authors, has at least two more papers on the subject:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3241983

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3047110

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3061765

One might get the impression he has a bit of an axe to grind. Then again, I was a teacher at a Swedish university for one year (and loved doing it in general), and I might actually be biased to think he has, because I have to admit that the abstracts did have me nodding in agreement.

(Apologies for the low-effort comment - I'll try reading them in detail after some coffee, but this is a bit too heavy before breakfast)

This isn't new or the fault of immigrants - I went to Sweden almost 20 years ago and almost every young person I came into contact with was an introvert average-to-pretty looking Smiths fan who was depressed or extrovert very attractive dance/pop fan who was depreseed/worried about not being taken seriously whilst taking their art shots on their retro camera.

Pisa winners in science: Singapore, Japan, Estonia, Taiwan, Finland.

Sweden is somewhere around 30, bravely competing with countries like USA, France, Russia and Spain.

Brief visit to Tallinn might solve this mystery, instead finding some minute errors in schooling system design. :-)

I have read only about half of the paper. It is written in a very compelling style, though I get the impression that the authors have an axe to grind.

However, to play the devil's advocate for a bit, standardized tests such as PISA and TIMSS are taken as uncontested measure for the quality of an education system. If you believe in the _social constructionist_ view (as presented in the paper), then obviously you would reject such tests as a valid measure just as you reject them when used in education. Clearly, an education system that is _not_ focused - and excuse the simplification - on making students learn a defined, common set of facts, is never going to do well on tests. You could argue that this is by design, because the real goal of education is to (?) make students question the "social construct"(?)[0]

The question at this point would then be whether Swedish students are doing well on other dimensions - are they competitive on the labor market, do they live happy lives?

To make it clear where I am standing: I believe that in order to question anything intelligently, you need a strong and broad base of facts to base your criticism on. I do not think there is a way around memorizing at least for part of the subjects. I benefit at this point of my life of basic knowledge in many areas that I _had_ to study during my education and had no interest or inclination for - I would never have chosen for example to study the basics of civil or contract law, which was a mandatory part of my somewhat quantitative BSc course, but the concepts I learned were very helpful in practice when dealing with employers, landlords, banks, etc.

I think to ask children to find their own interests and "question things critically" - which I guess boils down to expressing individual likes and dislikes if arguing based on facts is not part of it - at that young age deprives them of learning about the structure and rules of society, and about the choices you have available. How do you know you are interested in biology if you have not seen it somewhat in depth?

[0] Making this up; it is not clear to me if the social constructivist' take on education makes even the basic promise of preparing students for life, whereas in traditional fact-based education the promise is clear: learn facts that will help you at work and in life.

Immigration is a huge elephant in the room here. Sweden has admitted an enormous number of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. If you don't correct for that, your results will be meaningless.

Well, to (again) speak as someone who was teaching at a Swedish university for a while - in fact, in Malmö, supposedly the "Detroit/Chicago of Sweden" (depends on who you ask; it's a stupid exaggeration either way), and full of immigrants, I have a simple request : please stop spreading this bullshit. Being from a foreign country creates its problems, but has very, very little to do with the issues raised here.

I had plenty of problem students, and they were all Swedish. The issues have more to do with teachers not being allowed to tell them that they're wrong, to the point where they develop glass jaws and/or a complete lack of respect for their teachers and their own education. They just don't care, because nobody sets boundaries for them or tells them to push themselves to get better at something!

I was almost fired from a university for telling my students that the majority of them did not bother to write down their names, student number, use paragraphs, capital letters at the start of a sentence, or even something as basic as putting dots between sentences in their weekly one-page reports. That they all knew that they wouldn't have made it past the first year of high-school with that kind of attitude. That I could not in good faith accept this from adults who were two years away of having to write their own CV letters. And that therefore any report that did not meet these basic requirements would immediately be sent back with a note "format it properly" until it did (note: I would not even fail them - they would still be graded after the corrections).

This then resulted in a complaint to the higher-ups depicting me as some raging lunatic, and the higher-ups took the side of the complaining students with extreme prejudice, resulting in a near-firing.

If anything, the immigrant students had more fighting spirit than the locals, possibly because they're not pampered.

It's totally dishonest to analyze trends in an education system without accounting for immigration and ethnic differences. In the USA, for example, there is plenty to be learned about the education system by taking that into account. If you discover the performance among native Swedes isn't changed, you'll learn the problem isn't simply caused by changes to the Swedish school system.

Something like 20% of Sweden's population is of foreign origin. If the paper doesn't account for this, it's got a problem. The performance of American students in PISA or TMSS by racial breakdown has been well-documented -- blacks and Hispanics drag the average down more than Asians drag it up. And you can find that many comparisons between American states are just the result of Simpson's paradox. So that's something you need to check for when looking at Sweden's performance.

(In the paper you can find good evidence that a big portion of the deterioration is not caused by ethnic makeup. For example, advanced proficiency dropping from 12% to 3% on page 9. But it's not so clear about changes to performance at the bottom end.)

You raise very valid points, but the way you address them has a very different ring to it than "the big elephant in the room is...", which is a pretty blatant a dog-whistle for "the problem is dumb foreigners".

Now, I do wish to give the GP the benefit of doubt, but the expression is problematic regardless of intent. My comment was more of a response that implied dog-whistle. Admittedly, it was a bit reactionary because of my own personal experiences surrounding these issues, and the ease of which I have seen people blame things on foreigners without even a hint of self-reflection. But as you mention: the paper suggests these issues are not caused by immigration.

I got to know a Swede who came to France shortly after finishing his studies and we eventually befriended.

He told me how tough it was for him to be in front of people who he felt were bullying him to discover afterward that he was, to take his words, a mimosa (a flower which crumples once touched).

He said that thanks God he had two brothers and he quickly recovered because they used to fight (like brothers do). He blamed, like you, the pampered way of life he had. A good life, just not ready for non-Sweden life.

I remember an article about Chinese students who had similar problems when they had to face student life, coming from one child families where they were demi gods to their parents.

One of the problems is that feedback should happen in the form of criticizing bad results without attacking the person. The teacher has the responsibility to clearly express that. The student needs to be able to distinguish that.

I have a feeling that Swedish culture is a bit too conflict-avoiding in this regard, and not very good at distinguishing the two.

(To be clear: I was not ranting Linux Torvalds style)

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