Keywords

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 Socialismin 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”Footnote 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 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,Footnote 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 knowledge-basedcurriculum, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 4 Nevertheless, toward the end of and immediately after World War 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 6

The evidence provided by such scholarly observers of National Socialism as the political scientist Franz Neumann and the historian Timothy Snyder,Footnote 7 as well as by the German conservative intellectual Hermann Rauschning, who broke with Nazism in its early years,Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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-or-less sullen silence.”Footnote 14 It was predominantly also young men and women 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.Footnote 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, child-centered methods,” which were found to “amplify the students’ zeal for the war by engaging students more personally and bringing the present into the classroom”Footnote 16 and encourage children’s natural aggressive traits.Footnote 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 Hitlerjugendleader Baldur von Schirach) later became leading figures in the Third Reich.Footnote 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.Footnote 19 The Swedish school system was consequently brought into what Johan Östling calls a “Nazi sphere of association,”Footnote 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 schoolteachers were influenced by the Nazis,Footnote 21 although teachers were in fact largely immune to Nazi propaganda and teacher organizations rejected National Socialism as a creed.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 by progressive pedagogy in general.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 29 Moreover, anticipating the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge that was to emerge later, the Schools 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”Footnote 30 and that systematic and rigorous learning inspires obedience and submission.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 34Indeed, as Arvidson later explained, the ideal was that 30 children in a classroom would study from 30 different curricula.Footnote 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 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 40 Thus, the students in 9g who took the English exam referred to above 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,Footnote 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 Johannessonand 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, Johannessonand Magnusson were unable to find any evidence that teaching all students together would improve their ability to collaborate and interact socially with each other.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 and rules that they help to develop.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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 submitted by Alva Myrdal to the 1969 Social Democratic Party congress, a de facto government document, which declaredFootnote 50:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 decades of the new system.Footnote 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.Footnote 55

The Social Democrats acknowledged this state of affairs in a government billFootnote 56:

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.”Footnote 57Alva 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.Footnote 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 content” in physics and chemistry should be abandoned.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 65 In these institutions, the practices of older teachers were explicitly criticized, and no concrete training in how to instruct students was given.Footnote 66 Indeed, according to an analysis in the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the “displacement of teachers trained before the 1970s should have peaked around 1990.”Footnote 67 Moreover, “student influence” was for the first time enshrined in law.Footnote 68The 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 DemocratsFootnote 69 and by pedagogues influenced by postmodern social constructivist ideas.Footnote 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.Footnote 71

The 1994 National Curriculum

At least two factors made the 1994curriculum 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.Footnote 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 thinkingand self-directed learning and the development of personal opinions, while another set of goals was content-specific for the individual student.Footnote 73 Both sets of goals were nonspecific and open to interpretation. Some content-specific 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,”Footnote 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.”Footnote 75 The report also claimed that “there are no ‘pure’ facts,” only facts that take on meaning from what can be seen or detected.Footnote 76 This view of knowledge was summarized as followsFootnote 77:

Theoretical knowledgeis 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.”Footnote 78 It recommended that schools not structure the content of education into different subjects in the early grades but focus initially on sparking students’ curiosity and use “the children’s questions” as a starting point.Footnote 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”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 82

The 1994 curriculum was the first Swedish national curriculum to include a discussion on the concept of knowledge.Footnote 83 It statedFootnote 84:

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 learningFootnote 85:

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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 89

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.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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,”Footnote 94 teachers were required to justify in writing why they wanted to assign grades that diverged greatly from the results of standardized tests.Footnote 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.”Footnote 96 However, one of the defining features of the new system was that it eliminated the anchoring 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 98 Heavily influenced by the postmodern social constructivist view that objectively measurable knowledge does not exist,Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 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.