Switching off: Sweden says back-to-basics schooling works on paper

Not all experts are convinced Sweden’s back-to-basics push is exclusively about what’s best for students.

Criticising the effects of technology is “a popular move with conservative politicians”, Neil Selwyn, a professor of education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, said. “It’s a neat way of saying or signalling a commitment to traditional values.

“The Swedish government does have a valid point when saying that there is no evidence for technology improving learning, but I think that’s because there is no straightforward evidence of what works with technology,” Selwyn said. “Technology is just one part of a really complex network of factors in education.”

That seems very likely, especially considering how little control for other variables there seems to be. Obviously digital random materials from the internet can be worse than purpose made books but that is not about analog vs. digital.

I think the best thing for me was not having a tablet in school. Mine was the last generation in our district not to get iPads to use in schools. One big reason I got into IT was with old school computers with barely any safety measures which made it fun to find ways around. I had no idea what I was doing, but trying to get minecraft running on it helped me discover things like VMs and dual booting which sparked my interest in computers. With these school managed iPads there is nothing to break or to mess around with. For others with no computer at home that can be experimented with, I could see it being hard to find out about such things.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The return to more traditional ways of learning is a response to politicians and experts questioning whether Sweden’s hyper-digitalised approach to education, including the introduction of tablets in nursery schools, had led to a decline in basic skills.

Sweden’s minister for schools, Lotta Edholm, who took office 11 months ago as part of a centre-right coalition government, was one of the biggest critics of the all-out embrace of technology.

Some learning deficits may have resulted from the coronavirus pandemic or reflect a growing number of immigrant students who don’t speak Swedish as their first language, but an overuse of screens during school lessons may cause youngsters to fall behind in core subjects, education experts say.

“There’s clear scientific evidence that digital tools impair rather than enhance student learning,” Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, a highly respected medical school focused on research, said in a statement in August on the country’s national digitalisation strategy in education.

Poland, for instance, just launched a programme to give a government-funded laptop to each student starting in fourth grade in the hope of making the country more technologically competitive.

To counter Sweden’s decline in fourth grade reading performance, the Swedish government announced an investment worth kr685m (£50m) in book purchases for schools this year.

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