Sweden is bringing back books amid declining test scores:
In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country.
Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students.
These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden—and many other nations—moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too.
So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the "decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices" was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Fälth wrote. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting."
Fälth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills—especially reading, writing, and numeracy—must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose."
[...] Swedish officials emphasize that digital technology isn't being removed from schools altogether. Rather, digital aids "should only be introduced in teaching at an age when they encourage, rather than hinder, pupils' learning." Achieving digital competence remains an important objective, particularly in higher grades.
[...] If US educational leaders were to consult their Swedish colleagues, the advice they'd likely get is not to remove digital technology whole cloth. "The goal is recalibration rather than reversal," wrote Fälth. This was echoed in a statement sent to Undark by the Swedish Ministry of Education and Research: The "Swedish government believes that digitalization is fundamentally important and beneficial, but the use of digital tools in schools must be carried out carefully and thoughtfully."
In other words, the objective is not to reject digitalization. It's more nuanced than that. The goal is to judiciously establish boundaries around technology's selective and sequential use over stages of a pupil's educational development. This means introducing digital technology at later ages after basic reading and other skills have been achieved.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday April 08, @09:30PM (19 children)
While I agree with removing phones from the classroom, making kids carry around heavy backpacks full of books is the wrong way to do it. Give them one locked down A4 sized e-ink e-book in a heavy-duty metal case. No apps, communications, video or anything else on it, just a high-quality screen with the textbooks on it. Save the trees and the kids backs.
200 million years is actually quite a long time.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by FunkyLich on Wednesday April 08, @09:37PM (3 children)
I carried a bag of books and notebooks and all the needful. I don't remember it being as heavy as to be such a horror to remember or have me remain with permanent deformities of my bones. Rather, now that I think of it, played its role, however minor, into not let me grow fat and obese and clumsy and kept me exercised in a very natural way for many years.
(Score: 5, Funny) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @02:48AM (2 children)
> I don't remember it being as heavy as to be such a horror
Your high school let you off light. I had a bag that must have weighed 15-20kg and barely fit under the desk-seats as I shuttled from classroom to classroom. There was insufficient time to visit my storage locker between most classes, so I ended up carrying half the day's books or more on average.
University was much better - more time between classes and generally only one book per class.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09, @01:01PM (1 child)
We just went to our lockers between classes. I only ever carried a textbook and notebook to any class.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @08:57PM
>We just went to our lockers between classes.
Senior lockers were central enough for this to work. Juniors and earlier lockers were placed more peripherally and our hallways were narrow and crowded enough that it was physically impossible to get from one class to the locker to the next class without brutally elbowing your way through the crowds like a mugger in a New York subway station. Needless to say, that kind of behavior was rare and frowned upon.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by looorg on Wednesday April 08, @10:57PM (5 children)
You don't have to carry all the books. That is why they assign you a locker in school, even in Sweden, so that you can keep your clothes and books there while you are in school.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @04:21AM (4 children)
There's no guarantee that everybody gets a locker that's close enough to visit between classes, meaning that you might only get to swap books at lunch.
(Score: 5, Informative) by lars_stefan_axelsson on Thursday April 09, @09:57AM (1 child)
In Sweden, grades 1-6 you'll be in the same classroom with the same kids and teacher (unless you're the subject of some experiment...), so you're books will actually be in your desk (or in a drawer or similar in the classroom) so you'll only be carrying homework to/from school. And with current schooling practices there won't be much of that.
It's only in grades 7-9 and above that you'll move between class rooms and have different teachers in different subjects. You'll be old enough to carry your books then.
We also always had time to change our books between classes, our schools typically aren't that big; and even if we didn't it was only one extra set of books as we never did more that two different subjects before/after lunch.
Stefan Axelsson
(Score: 3, Informative) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @04:23PM
School size is key. the US generally has grades up through 5th in a single class room for most of the day and 6th and up do have the kids traveling around. But most of the schools are much too large here to allow you to pack up your stuff after the bell and be ready before the next bell with travel time in between and still have time to get to the locker. I never remembered having much time once I got to class to hang out or to where I could have gone to get something out of a locker between classes.
I must not be the only one, because I was student teaching in a middle school and they just had an extra set of books for the class to use so they didn't have to carry them around. But, schools in the US are often times quite big, and sometimes they're multiple buildings not unlike small college campuses.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Thursday April 09, @10:09AM (1 child)
I'm not sure how it is these days but back in my day you tended to have about 10 minutes, sometimes more, or so between class. Which was ample time to walk back to your locker and change books. Even as the schools grew bigger it was not so big could not walk back and forth in the allotted time, unless you felt the need to do a lot of other things to during the break.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @04:17PM
10 minutes wouldn't be enough time to swing by to get books if it's not on the way. Even if it is on the way it's really not enough time. You start putting the stuff away when the bell rings, and you have your stuff out in the next class when the bell rings. You've got to exit though the same door as all the other classmates in one room get back in the other and to your seat in the new one. And travel through some rather busy halls.
If you've got a small school, that might just might allow for getting the books in between classes, but probably not. I remember one year my locker was on the top floor and none of my classes were on that 3rd floor.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Bentonite on Thursday April 09, @01:12AM (6 children)
No, you should not attack children with proprietary software and digital handcuffs like that.
If there is going to be software in the classroom, for the duty of education, it *must* be free software the children are free to run, learn from, change and/or share.
e-ink panels are still very expensive due to patents, especially an A4 sized panel and I would doubt manufacturing an e-ink panel less environmentally damaging than bleaching ¼ of a plantation tree.
Still, if the Swedish government will negotiate a volume order of e-ink panels with a condition that full usage documentation of the panels is included (i.e. complete usage instructions as well as including the waveform and waveform complete corresponding source code under a free license), as well as a volume order of suitable unhandcuffed SBC's that work with free software and some suitable cases, I'll be more than happy to develop the hardware design and software for them (I'll select a suitable GNU/Linux-libre distro and probably would have koreader as the default reading software).
I'd probably just not include a Wi-Fi card, as a removable SD card and/or USB port as well as a UART interface would be a far more convenient way to load books - of course the students could choose to plug-in a Wi-Fi card and load a version of GNU Linux-libre with ath9k_htc compiled in.
e-ink panels don't have a fast enough refresh rate to play videos or display social media, so you don't even need proprietary restrictions for that not to happen.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @04:20PM (5 children)
I'd take the proprietary software over a messed up back from hauling all those books and supplies around. These sorts of comments are why it's so hard for normies to get into Linux. And no, e-ink panels are not expensive, especially when you compare them with the cost of actual books. Even in single quantities, you can get a 7" for under $75.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday April 10, @03:15AM (4 children)
With good posture taught, a couple of books will strengthen children's backs, rather than mess then up.
Also, a slightly sore back due to poor posture can easily be fixed (a weight more than a few books is needed to stuff your back) - while a lifetime of subservience to proprietary software companies taught is far more damaging and much harder to fix.
Considering that the kernel, Linux is proprietary software, it would be a good thing for users to decide to not use that proprietary kernel and install GNU/Linux-libre instead.
There is little difference in practice using windows and using GNU/Linux with exclusively proprietary software, especially proprietary software from Microsoft - in either case the used doesn't have freedom.
A ~155mm × 90mm panel isn't very big and $75 USD, not including the driver, is not cheap (plus at that price, refresh is quite slow - I see a 12s refresh advertised for one of such panels).
A4 monochrome panels seem to go for $125.80+ USD, not including the driver.
Several books are cheaper than $125.80 USD to print, although scamming publishers charge far more than that - that's really a matter for the government to refuse to get scammed (i.e. go directly to the author(s), invalidate any contract that surrenders their copyright to the publisher(s), make a deal where the book is available under a free license in exchange for a single payment and get as many books as needed printed from a commercial printer).
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday April 10, @06:08AM (3 children)
A couple books? You do realize that there are 6 periods during the day and that even if you waste some of your lunch time going to get books, it's still rather a lot to be lugging around, right? But, then again, never miss an opportunity to make open source advocates look like crazy weirdos.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Friday April 10, @07:23AM (2 children)
I completed school with physical books, I didn't have a problem.
I don't get where you got "open source" from, considering that I did not write "open" and wrote free software;
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.en.html [gnu.org]
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html [gnu.org]
I am a extremist - I consider "open source" advocates to be infidels - but if you realized how bad things are, you would either give up or become an extremist.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday April 10, @03:00PM (1 child)
Yep, no idea where I got that idea from. This definitely isn't the start of the post I first responded to, that's for sure.
(Score: 2) by Bentonite on Saturday April 11, @05:49AM
The message was in reply to deimtee, who wrote;
"lock down" is typically implemented with proprietary software and digital handcuffs.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @02:43AM (1 child)
>Save the trees and the kids backs.
I agree with saving the kids' backs. I'm not so sure how many trees will be saved, though. If you look at the "life of an average school book" it may serve 5-10 years before retirement. Will a tablet last as long? What amount of resources are required to refine the metals and glass and electronics and battery and charging system? (Is e-ink efficient enough for a solar charger to be practical?) While in theory an e-ink device gives access to an infinite amount of content, how much content will the average schoolchild consume through a single tablet before their dog eats it, or it's dropped in the toilet, or under the wheels of the bus, or any of a million creative ends?
I think the real thing a "return to dead trees" is accomplishing is: content control. The people along the chain of content delivery: teachers, principals, curriculum directors - they all understand books, they know what is getting into their students' hands through their supply chain - with a software driven device they're less sure, and as things have been implemented up to this point: they do have significantly less control over their digital devices' content presentation than they do with the familar dead tree delivery system.
I think the thing that the dead tree advocates are missing is: Google, Duck Duck Go, ChatGPT, Grok, X, Farcebook, Tak Toke and the rest of it are at the fingertips of every pupil every minute of the day that they aren't under "zero tolerance phone restriction" by the system - so, they may be retaking control of the content in the classroom, but that was always a minority of the content delivered to young eyeballs anyway, even before television - much less home and pocket internet.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09, @12:27PM
> ... "life of an average school book" it may serve 5-10 years before retirement.
True if the books have a high quality sewn (actual stitches) binding, but many don't. It's cheaper (by a buck or two per book) to use one of several types of glued binding. When we worked with a publisher, they commented on college text books that were designed to fall apart after roughly a year's use--this is done on purpose to limit the used textbook market.
Does your school district have a purchasing department that is smart enough to understand this level of detail? Or are they required to take the low bidder?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday April 08, @10:46PM (1 child)
This situation is more about society control than about effectiveness of learning process.
It is not about skills.
Traditional printed schoolbook is fixed media. It cannot be trivially modified and if it is, such modifications can be easily audited and detected. And punished.
More importantly, for this very reason (of being fixed) a printed book holds guarantee of not containing improper information when redacted by authorities.
Whatever the meaning of improper means, of course.
However, digital platforms cannot hold such guarantee, at least not effectively. Thus the learners potentially could see some information they were not supposed to know about.
Authorities already noticed the effect of established social narrative corrosion and decided to step back on technology. That was put under the distraction umbrella, obviously.
Not the first time in history that's happening, though.
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @02:51AM
> not containing improper information when redacted by authorities.
Usually, with some exceptions which are more easily accomplished on dead trees than through software: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Severus_Snape%27s_copy_of_Advanced_Potion-Making [fandom.com]
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Wednesday April 08, @10:55PM
This is really the main reasoning behind it. If you can't master the basics first then what use are the tools. If you can't read, write and do basic math then what kind of help do you have from the machine. How will you even learn from it if you can't ask it for help or understand what it tells you. If you don't know it then how can you trust or utilize what the machine offers. Or if you will it kind of turned out that you can't just skip the basics and go straight to the advanced stuff. If you want to learn advanced things it is kind of essential that you first grasp the basics. They tried desperately to skip the basics with that old saying "kids today knows so much about computers and so on". Turns out they don't. Clicking icons and using their phone 24-7 isn't really as helpful as initially thought.
https://lnu.se/en/staff/linda.falth/ [lnu.se]
But this bring back the books is just a step in the grand plan. As noted it's not about getting rid of the machines. It's about learning the basics first so that you can utilize the machines. After all if you don't know the basics then how can you use the machines and use it to gather and gain knowledge. Just searching for things isn't really knowledge or learning. If the "knowledge" is tied to your internet connection then that ain't knowledge.
But there are a lot of other adjacent and related things that have happened at the same time. Such as once again mandating that every school should have its own library (again). They used to have that when I went to school. But then the Internet was not really available for schools. When I went there was no internet. I had to go to the college next door to get access (and use their awesome Sun Workstations). I guess it turns out that getting rid of the libraries, the librarians and all the books just wasn't such as big money saver after all. But during the laptop years (or whatever we should call them) the libraries where turned into "relax corners" with couches and things for the students to relax in.
Also testing revealed that students just didn't improve or become better from having all the knowledge of the interwebz and technology at their fingertips. They did not learn more, better or faster. Turned out this the Google-knowledge was just there for as long as the machine was there and you had access. After all why bother to learn anything if you can just look it up every time. They hoped that perhaps eventually it would stick. It doesn't appear to have.
Then Sweden also gazed longingly at Finland mainly. Why are their pupils so much better then ours and so forth. Turns out they still put a lot of emphasis on learning the basics first. So we want to be like them. And try to be like them by just copying them.
There are other curriculum changes that have been enforced over the years on more "soft" skills and knowledge. Some call them "woke". Turns out they are not very useful or easy to measure. Seems certain adults liked them more then the kids did. But those are now being sort of scaled back quietly as not to anger certain crowds.
For a long time there was also an emphasis on that students should learn by themselves or they should seek the knowledge themselves. Teachers was more like friends that should use the force and guide them. They should not use angry red pens to mark errors and stress out the poor students. As that would be very unfriendly of them. This had horrible drawback. After all friend not teacher was seen as being more important. Which led us down the same path once more -- if you don't have any actual knowledge it's really hard to gather more knowledge. Just searching for things on Google, or AI and just swallow everything it tells you, isn't really learning. Then if you learn the "wrong" things they are really REALLY hard to correct or undo that at a later stage, like years later when you get them as students at the university and they can't do basic maths or read anything longer then a tweet before their brain hurts.
It probably have not helped either that they keep changing the grading system every few years or so. Most of them doesn't last a decade before they feel like tweaking it.
Then there is that most stupid of stupid things we, Sweden, did when we allowed schools to be run as a business. Yes, we have companies that run schools for profit. It's very rare on the university/college level, there are a few. But it's quite common on the high school level. Perhaps in theory it was a good idea. But in practice horrible. As it turns out these companies wants to make a profit. Then only way they can do that is to have less teachers, unqualified teachers, less books and such things that cost money. After all there is no tuition fees from the parents or anything, there are those schools to be they are extremely rare and mostly for the mega rich kids. Also they had a clear incentive to fudge with grades and such to sell an image of them being the good school. So they could get more pupils applying and make more money ...
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday April 08, @11:14PM (7 children)
Textbooks are too expensive. Like $75 for a nice hardcover retail although schools buying in bulk get a better deal.
However, I am related to two former school teachers and as you'd expect the legacy paper publishers captured the market and ebooks "have to" cost a substantial multiple of the old textbook budget because they know the district has tons of money to buy ipads so why not charge $179.99 per year for the ebooks on the ipads?
X-ers and older remember having to carry tons of books however IRL I don't think I USUALLY had all that many textbooks. I took an upper level uni RF/microwave class where the instructor refused to purchase a textbook they all sucked and we got a lot of photocopies and strange selections of manuals. Come to think of it the only EE classes I had with genuine textbooks were "weed out intro to ohms law" and a linear circuit analysis course (Thevenin voltages vs Norton currents etc) To be blunt linear circuit analysis was also a weed-out course LOL. I remember the "now you learn transistors" course had a TI transistor databook as our textbook and our assignments were all like "properly bias a two transistor class AB amp using as per your engineering datasheets." You'd get points off if you did something stupid like try to make a 50 watt guitar amplifier using two 2N3904 and he loved trick questions where you had to do a thermal analysis (make it work at full power up to automobile temperatures +125C etc) Anyway, yeah, I don't think kids need textbooks as much as our rosy memories would imply.
You'd like to THINK ipads would lead to a golden era of free shared collaborative pdf textbooks but public education is WAY too corrupt for that and thats a direct threat to a billion dollar industry so they will not tolerate that.
ipads are a tool to extract more taxpayer money, not a tool to teach kids, unfortunately.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @02:53AM (6 children)
The textbook industry is rife with graft and corruption. Never will you find a more likely junket to Cancun than in the company of a textbook salesman - not even on the eve of a record setting cold-snap in Texas whilst visting Ted Cruz.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @06:24PM (5 children)
It is, I haven't been keeping up with high school textbooks, but at college they've more than doubled over the last 20 years as the number of text book publishers has dwindled. It's gotten so bad that the last degree I earned used a bunch of open source textbooks on PDF wherever possible. The books will be like $200 for a single class for a single quarter, or a rented ebook that isn't much less and times out after 6 months and regardless of format there are code that go with them for resources that are free with purchase of a new book, or are nearly as expensive as the book if you need to buy one.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @06:52PM (4 children)
On the one hand, producing a textbook is a lot of work. My filters professor wrote his own (captive audience, we had to buy the books he wrote, he cackled with glee when they fell apart halfway through the semester)... Now, did he do that work? Mostly, no, mostly he had his graduate assistants do the bulk of the work for him, but I'd bet he put in 400 or so hours of supervision / administration / dealing with the publisher for the first one he did and maybe 200 hours per text that he published after that - his TAs? Thousands. Especially after the VAX crashed and they had to re-key all the LaTEX into the system again. Then those were selling (in the 1980s) for $50 a pop, I'll guesstimate he got about $20 per copy sold, so in an average semester with three classes of 20 students he's pulling in $1200 just on his captive audience sales, close to $3000 per year counting summer sessions, and of course his books are being promoted for outside sales as well. The topic never changes, so once written those books probably sell for 20+ years, until another diabolical professor steps in to eat his royalty stream out from his retirement years. Still $60K for 600 hours work on those first two books just from captive audience sales, worth doing - but it's really the book publishing companies getting rich.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @07:06PM (3 children)
It is, but it's not that much work. Depending upon the specific subject, it can cost as little as $10k from start to finish. I'm sure that for some topics it can get quite expensive, especially if there's a bunch of technical details that have to be referenced and cited though.
Still, when James Stewart of calculus book infamy died, he had like a $35m house and that's just a fraction of the money that students were being expected to pay for the books. Granted, he's an outlier and most writers don't make anywhere near that much money, but the books were crap and there were better calculus books on the market. His seemed to mysteriously always be missing the only information that I needed to know to get through the problem sets.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @08:49PM (2 children)
> His seemed to mysteriously always be missing the only information that I needed to know to get through the problem sets.
Bug, or feature?
I doubt my filters prof ever did more than about 5x his captive audience sales - it's like a street musician selling CDs, without promotion you're never going to be Ed Sheerhan no matter how much better of a musician you are. I'd bet he had a few professor friends here and there he could bribe to spec his book and that was about it.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @09:08PM (1 child)
Probably more a byproduct of how they choose books. It's generally a bunch of people that already know the subject choosing on the basis of who even knows what. So, they probably don't even notice the various things that are wrong with the book as they aren't the ones that are going to be actually using it, that's the students. If students and people involved in other departments were involved in choosing the books, you'd probably see the situation improve greatly.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 09, @10:34PM
>If students and people involved in other departments were involved in choosing the books
You'd hear that crackling sound of Hell freezing over...
https://www.messynessychic.com/2014/04/30/welcome-to-hell-the-norwegian-town-that-freezes-over-every-winter/ [messynessychic.com]
Norway is quite progressive in many ways.
🌻🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by VLM on Wednesday April 08, @11:19PM (3 children)
Keep in mind that the people, culture, and language of Sweden are being forcibly replaced and the values of legacy Swedes will probably not match the values of their replacements, so the times they are a changin'.
The replacement for legacy Swedes are not known for worship of technology in their former countries and you'll have simple language issues.
A lot of the people replacing legacy Swedes don't believe in stuff like girls/women learning how to read/write so for half the population, technology to improve that is wasted, better to spend the money on metal detectors for schools, for example. "Swedish values" don't matter if they soon won't exist as a people anymore.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by looorg on Thursday April 09, @12:48AM
Just how many non-legacy Swedes do you think we have? Or lets be honest here how many dark skinned people and/or Muslims do you think we have? As I assume that white, and people that look like us, immigrants are not a problem.
I'm not saying that those people that do not believe in that girls/women should learn to read and write and such things do not exist. But they are a very small number of a somewhat small fraction of all the people. Also they have about zero power. So unless you think that they are planning to violently overthrow the government anytime soon that just isn't happening. Not now, not as a future demographic either. They might have more children then the normal family but they are not going to outbreed us anytime soon, or they have a real long catch up time. Most of the non-legacy Swedes are people from Finland, Norway and Denmark. Add in a few people from the Balkans. The amount of people from Africa is quite small, the amounts of from the middle east are larger but not exactly about to outbreed us anytime soon either. Also they seem to cluster around the three big cities. The rest of the country is pretty white.
That said cultural values are always changing. There is a large amount of people that doesn't want us to adapt to American cultural values either. A lot of orange-clown-man-bad people, which is probably growing on the daily. But that I gather is the Taco-plan in general -- to piss off Europe.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09, @05:12AM (1 child)
Swedish citizen here.
I don't know who's been feeding you propaganda, but this shit you're sprouting really, really reeks.
Sweden's cultural values are not being replaced. If anything, foreigners are such a small minority (outside of a few small parts of Stockholm) that it's more a case of their values are being replaced with Swedish values. As for language, almost every industry mandates Swedish fluency as a requirement. One exception used to be the IT industry. These days, most jobs in the industry require either full Swedish fluency, or enough to hold a long conversation with your coworkers while at lunch, or after-work.
I suggest that you closely evaluate your sources of propaganda and change some for sources that don't outright lie to you.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Thursday April 09, @06:26PM
You're just saying that because you're Swedish. How dare you use insider knowledge to go around correcting people.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ShovelOperator1 on Thursday April 09, @08:44AM
The thing is totally different and it's a vendor lock-in. Again, some EU countries already have these too.
In my country, there was an initiative to make an open-source textbooks, possible to use on the computer, tablet, e-book reader or just printable. And some of these textbooks indeed were made. However, publishers literally paid teachers, with money or expensive gifts, to choose their textbooks. And it looks like the "think-about-children" social vulnerability worked again.
So how it works now here? Every school year, publishers mess with the book: Reorder chapters, move illustrations to various pages, only to make usage of an old book in a new education year impossible. So, the circulation of used textbooks just disappeared. You have to buy a new edition, whose only difference is the alignment and position of chapters or small change in a list of e.g. chemical compounds. This is too good profit source to be omitted.
And there are some "brilliant" publishers who put these textbooks in hardcovers. The result is that the backpack is heavier than any pupil or student is allowed to lift. Of course, the official explanation is that they should leave unneeded textbooks at school. The real situation is that there is no place for it. But there is an official statement, so it's OK.
This reminds me another story, of another ex-Eastern block country which is now in the EU. In 1970s (peak of the communist government), there was a problem with alcohol, used in quantities which exceeded any possible sane limits, also called "driving self to the state of a bag of potatoes", and it required medical staff to straighten the situation which was less and less an episode, being more and more epidemic. However, it was forbidden to say it loud as the government had significant income from alcohol tax. So doctors invented some ?latin? word literally meaning "addiction to drinking", like drinking water or juice, but not alcohol - and it was suddenly OK to fight against it. Fortunately they did not try to ban glasses as alcohol can be drank from them. This comes to my mind when I see the modern panic about "smartphone addiction". As I'm not enthusiastic about smartphones (I don't use one, i prefer ultramobile PCs), I cannot blame the device for being misused by corporations, who invent casino-grade addiction mechanisms or use dark patterns to make other people creativity work for their profits, or extinguish it entirely when it may serve other purposes than corporations' profit.