The education authorities are deeply worried. Yet another PISA survey shows that Swedish schoolchildren are doing increasingly badly in science, reading comprehension and math. Nobody seems to know what to do though it appears quite obvious: stop mass immigration, return to teacher-centered education, hand out grades and impose discipline in the classroom.
None of the 33 OECD countries in the survey has dropped as much as Sweden. But although we have seen the same trend in survey after survey, no one has done anything about the fundamental problem – a nonsense school that leaves the students in the lurch.
Nobody wants the old school back where teachers beat their students. But consider how much else we have thrown out with the bath water: Order and discipline in the classroom, grades for behavior and orderly conduct, grades altogether, homework, teacher-centered education and so on.
All of this could be reintroduced with immediate effect. The problem is that the young teachers do not have the education or the authority needed to keep order in the classroom. Many of them come directly from jobs in kindergartens and the school principals often come from positions as preschool leaders.
If one adds the fact that many schools have a great number of students from easily offended honor cultures, the result can only be catastrophic. Meek female teachers beseech the boys to be quiet and are laughed at. At the Rosengaard school in Malmö it got so bad that they had to abolish the upper grades.
When my stepdaughter was in the upper grades, she asked me one day: ”Why are we so much worse than you were when you went to school? Are we more stupid than you?
The answer is both yes and no. It is hard to imagine that the IQ level can have decreased so drastically over one generation, but mass immigration has brought with it a great number of pupils with a lower IQ than that of the Swedes. And above all – newly arrived students don’t speak Swedish and are not getting any help learning it. Instead we spend vast resources teaching them the language of their home countries.
An analysis of the 2012 PISA survey shows that math results have dropped for all groups. High-performance as well as low-performance students score lower than they did in 2000. For reading comprehension and science the problem is even more pronounced. High-performance students are still doing all right – whereas the low-performing students have sunk like a stone.
The Swedish school experiment is nothing but an enormous betrayal of the students. As always changes were made with ”good intentions”: It was a pity if students got bad grades, so we stopped giving grades; it was a pity if they had to do homework, so we cut that down to a minimum; it was a pity if students had to sit and listen to a teacher, so we stopped that and went over to group work and ”own learning”.
Now we see the results of a school that makes no demands combined with an increasing number of students who don’t speak Swedish and are definitely not susceptible to a soft teaching style. The soft style works all right for quiet and clever girls but is a catastrophe for proactive boys.
Not to speak of the catastrophe for teachers who neither have the methods nor the authority to protect themselves from violent students. See the video below about the teachers from Gothenburg who report on broken ribs and concussions as a result of mistreatment by students.
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