This weblog post was completed on 2019/05/25. I am now working on it 2 248 days later on 2025-07-20, with an intention of publishing it on 2025-07-26. It is the oldest unscheduled = draft post that I have. With the exception of this paragraph, and the introductory photogaph, the content is identical to what it was in 2019. Content about Nesna is included because I am a proponent of decentralized education. Nesna municipality has a population of about 1 800 people.
In this weblog post, readers are presented with an example of political misuse of the educational system. They are encouraged to reflect on politicians spending billions (of whatever currency) to make meaningless changes to school buildings, while failing to implement free or less expensive changes that would improve the learning situation for millions of children. In particular, I would like readers to consider that the real winner of this situation is the construction industry, while the real losers are everyone else, including school children, taxpayers and teachers. This inappropriate enthusiasm for meaningless changes is depriving children of their right to a good education.
Life is full of learning experiences. In fact, some people might feel that they just get the hang of what life is about, before it abruptly ends. There are many ways in which people can learn skills, gain knowledge and develop wisdom. Not all of these involve schools, but most involve some form of pedagogy. Pedagogy refers to the arts, practices and methods of learning (and teaching), that can be used to acquire these skills. In other words, how rather than what, one learns or teaches.
Swedish school politicians, like the Norwegian politicians, were inspired by the school model, School 2000, which was established by the couple Ingemar and Ingrid Mattsson in 1990. At the center of this model is a base (rather than a classroom), that can best be described as a holding pen, where pupils from up to four classes (80 and in some cases 100 people) can be contained. I am convinced that many bureaucrats liked it, because they could count the cost saving of using just one teacher, instead of four, to monitor these large groups. Many teachers protested against the new school building concepts, because they believed bases and group rooms would bind them to an educational form that works poorly. Swedish teachers came to the same conclusions in the 1990s. In Norway, a debate about bases versus classrooms raged from about 2000 to 2015, with teachers against, and school bureaucrats for.
School 2000 promoters argued that they were simply promoting a more “flexible” form of teaching. The Swedish love affair with the new school model, however, became short-lived. Yet, the entire school structure in Sweden in the 1990s was redesigned in accord with the principles of School 2000. However, it was quickly rejected before much of the changes could be implemented, because the model showed that it did not work. It was easy for pupils to evade control by teachers in bases. Most Swedish schools quickly switched back to traditional classroom teaching again. Finland, educational world leader according to PISA and other surveys, is the only country in the Nordic region that has not been inspired by Mattssons’ model.
Education researcher Lars Näslund found why School 2000 didn’t work, observing students at a primary school from 1996 to 1999. He concluded that the pedagogical form used in School 2000 failed weak pupils. Despite overwhelming data showing the model’s failure, and despite the published evidence, Norwegian politicians chose School 2000 as their educational model when at the beginning of the millennium, they searched for ideas to reform schools.
Norwegian politicians, school leaders and bureaucrats and teachers travelled from Norway to Sweden in thousands to look at Swedish schools. While teachers observed the failure of the system, this was lost on the politicians and bureaucrats. In Norway, hundreds of schools costing billions were remodelled to mirror School 2000. While the same problems emerged as in Sweden, Norwegian politicians failed to turn off the funding.