The story behind a debate article: A tale of educational ideology and greed
Recently, Professor Paul Kirschner wrote about one of my debate articles from 2016 on his blog, which drew international interest and resurfaced the article on the internet. I am humbled by the attention of Professor Kirschner, whose voice I find one of the most important in contemporary educational research. I took the opportunity to translate the article into English.
However, I also want to comment on the article. In 2016, it was the most-read debate article in Dagens Nyheter, the largest newspaper in Sweden. I know of at least two contemporary research projects analyzing the Swedish school debate where the article is one of their objects of inquiry. Personally, I find it lazy armchair research to conduct text analysis on arguments written by people who are still alive. If you want to know what I meant with the article, ask me, or at least read this story. It’s an interesting story about educational ideology, mono-causal explanations, cherry-picking arguments, how a country can destroy its educational system, and greed, above all it is a story about greed.
Seven years ago, I was finishing a book project that questioned educational ideas such as minimally guided instruction, problem-based learning, inquiry learning, active learning classrooms, education with mixed-age groups, etc. As a teacher, I had been trained to believe in these ideas, but as a professor in pedagogy, I had seen that such methods rarely worked in practice, lacked sustainable evidence, and enhanced inequality. I wanted to restore the confidence of older teachers who felt that their professional experience was worth less to nothing.
During my own teacher training, I had been warned. I should not listen to older colleagues. They were considered to be traditional teachers stuck in a time when people needed training for industrial work. Their educational methods were seen as outdated and sometimes even harmful to the students’ ability to develop the skills that would be valued in the future (creativity, critical thinking, problem-solving, etc.). As a young teacher and during my initial years as a PhD student, I held this attitude. It was the zeitgeist in Swedish education during the late 90s and early 00s. The message was that whatever you become as a teacher, do not become anything like the old generation of teachers. What we were going to become instead was unclear. As a new teacher, you knew what you shouldn’t do (instruct, explain, tell, show), but you had no idea about what you should do instead. When I wrote the book, I thought that this vagueness of the new professional role could be one reason why so few new students wanted to become teachers.
To draw interest to my ideas, I wrote a debate article some weeks before the book was published. Apart from the issue of teacher shortage, I also wanted to make the point that many political reforms of the Swedish school system, made for economic reasons, were sold as educational reforms. Hence, I wanted to position these educational ideas as rhetorical devices for accomplishing material reforms. For example, if you want to save the school budget by having fewer classes, frame it with the idea that age-mixed groups are beneficial for learning. If you want to have fewer teachers per student, minimally guided instruction is the way to go. If you want to have a charter school system on a national level, say that there are many ways to reach educational goals, emphasize students’ individual differences, and claim that it’s beneficial for a school system to provide pedagogical options suiting the individual needs of different students.
During my first years as a PhD student, I had given talks where I basically just echoed more senior academics who were “rethinking education for a future knowledge society”. In the article, I addressed the fact that Professor Jonas of 2016 was not of the same opinion as PhD-student Jonas of 2001. I apologized for a talk I had given as a young PhD student, not knowing any better, and recommended that more senior colleagues, who had played an active part in some of the Swedish school reforms, followed my example. My hope was that this would be a reconciliation for the teachers who felt that their years of experience weren’t worth anything. However, asking fellow academics to be self-critical misfired badly.
I had suggested that the article should have the headline: “One reason for the low status of the teaching profession is the educational ideas of the 90s”. However, the copy editor chose a very different headline: “I apologize for the educational ideas of the 90s.” The copy editor also wrote a preamble that, when read together with the headline, gave the impression that I was one of the architects behind everything that went wrong with the Swedish school during the 90s, and now I was coming out and apologizing for these great sins. This narrative was emphasized even more when the article was put behind a paywall after a few hours. Without a subscription, readers could only see the headline and the preamble. The story took on a life of its own and was spread through other news outlets. Social media exploded, and my inbox was flooded with interview requests.
Now to understand what happened next, one must have some form of knowledge about the Swedish school system. In Sweden we have implemented Milton Freidman’s ideas of giving parents a voucher to be used on a private sector for education, i.e., charter schools. We allow private schools to be run for profit. The national assessment tests we have are marked by the students’ own teacher, and the test result is only used as a guide for the students’ final grades, the teacher can set higher grades than the test suggests. Our curriculum is based on learning goals that are sometimes quite vague and resemble goals in higher education focusing on independent problem solving etc. Anyone with some form of systems literacy can see that our school system is a witch’s brew.
Sweden have created a school system with incentives that omits the fundamentals of good teaching. Schools that give out high grades get more students, which means more money for the school owners. Teachers are under pressure to make everybody pass. Government schools must play by the same rules, they compete for the vouchers as well. Students that come from privileged homes are easier to teach, hence the private schools have mechanisms for selecting the “right kind of students” (those that demand less resources). An important note regarding these charter schools is that when they started, one of the core arguments was that they could provide alternative pedagogies. The charter schools marketed themselves as being progressive. Nowadays the argument is the complete opposite. Charter schools are promoting themselves as having better discipline and higher expectations. They will of course, being for profit companies, follow whatever trends that draws the attention of parents.
When you tell international colleagues about the Swedish charter school system, they hardly believe it is true. They ask: “how can politicians let this pass, isn’t it well know that an educational system is imperative for a nations well-being and economic growth?”. If one looks at the ownership structures and the boards of the school companies, one will find quite a few former politicians. There is a tight bond between politicians and the private school sector. And it’s all legal. Our current minister for school is but one example, she used to be in the board of one of these school companies. I told you this was a story about greed.
How is all this related to my debate article from 2016? Since Sweden realized, due to declining scores in PISA, that our education system had problems there has been a political debate on how to explain why we are falling behind. From proponents of charter schools, the argument has been that the main problem is progressive ideologies, from opponents the arguments has been that it is the market system that follows with the charter schools that is the problem. Personally, I see mono-causal explanations as way to simplistic. Our problems are complicated, and many factors are entangled in each other. One cannot just pick one ingredient out of the witch’s brew and say that this is what makes it taste bad.
When my article was published, former minister of education, Jan Björklund, tweeted a link to it. In his tweet he stated that my article showed that charter schools was not to blame for declining PISA-results. In the public eye, and to my fellow educational researchers, I was now associated to the with the charter school advocates. The narrative became, that this professor (who seems to support the politics of Jan Björklund) is the architect behind the progressive reforms in the Swedish school, and now he is regretful. This story suited the charter school advocates perfectly. No one mentioned the fact that they used to be the forerunners of independent learning and minimally guided instruction.
The debate that followed was harsh. In a couple of articles, I was accused of enforcing a political agenda since there were no (according to my critics) support for my claims. Some fellow academics wrote texts that attempted a form of, gaslightning, claiming that the progressive/constructivist ideas that flourished in Sweden (and the world) in the late 90s never happened or was a marginal phenomenon. They claimed that Seymour Papert, never had any influence on the Swedish schools. One colleague at my own workplace wrote a piece that questioned why I apologized for the school of the 90s, since I hardly could have had any influence on it due to my age. It was obvious that he had written his hit piece after only reading the preamble and the headline to my article. I had only apologized for being the voice in the choir at one time, now suddenly I was seen as the composer. In hindsight I might have been naïve to think that people read the full text before engaging in debate. But I really expected that, at least from my fellow educational researchers.
Apart from the debate, things got nasty at my workplace. Just to mention a few things that happened. When I entered the coffee room, it went all silent. Discussions stopped, and you could feel the tension in the room. I was supposed to have a presentation for the public about the book, the head of communications canceled my presentation. One colleague suggested that they should have a hearing with me, so “I could get the opportunity to explain myself”, well I wasn’t expecting the inquisition (no one does). One group of researchers had an academic seminar about one of my texts (related to the article). They held it in a seminar room right below my room, but I, as an author wasn’t invited. I wasn’t allowed to have the book release at my workplace, even though others before and after had been allowed to do that. After some weeks I had to go on a part time sick leave due to stress. For two months I worked half time. I lost a lot of progressive friends. I gained some new conservative friends, at least until they realized that I was against the Swedish charter school system.
So, do I regret engaging in the debate? I did then, I do not any longer. If there is one thing I hopefully accomplished it was to show that being critical against certain educational methods doesn’t necessarily entail a particular political view. You can think that the legacy of John Dewey (as it has been interpreted in our time) is problematic and at the same time find the Swedish charter school system to be destructive.
Also, the tide has turned. With publications such as Great teaching toolkit and Kirschner and Hendricks How learning happens, research from educational psychology is presented in forms that are actionable and useful. I cannot enough stress how Cognitive load theory has challenged the constructivist ideas and questioned sociocultural assumptions about external memory systems making knowledge of facts obsolete. I am glad that this theory preceded the latest generation of AI-technology. It makes us who think it is important to teach basic skills less vulnerable for the next wave of arguments about “future learners” and “21st century skills”.
What I still try to figure out is why my colleagues felt so threatened by my suggestion for self-criticism? Why is the suggestion of putting certain ideas to the test provocative for a scholar? Isn’t that exactly what our job is all about? I cannot fully wrap my head around it, but I have a vague hypothesis. During the pandemic I attended the conference of the Swedish Educational Research Association. One of the seminars was called a strategic meeting. I thought that it was about outreach, and strategies for disseminating results to the public. It wasn’t. It was about securing funding to the field. As I listened, it dawned on me, that some of the researchers worked with issues that had no clear practical applications. These researchers seemed worried that neither the public nor politicians would understand their work. It might have been the case that when I questioned educational ideologies, I also threatened the privilege of conducting armchair research. I told you. Greed.
