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The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

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Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#181

Post by sha1337 »

I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden.

>The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen.

Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind.

Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article):

>I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school system that increases segregation and allows jihadist schools run by people with links to Islamism and violent extremism

They're talking about muslim schools. What is said doesn't accurately represent reality nor is it non-partisan (obviously).

Sweden Democrats are the most right-leaning party in the Swedish Parliament, they don't like muslims (to put it mildly). Yet the author is blaming them for not going hard enough on the muslims community in Sweden.

It's a bit of a trend now with right-wing extremists in Sweden to focus on attacking muslim schools, as if having Arabic/Quran lessons apart from the regular school curriculum is equivalent to training a militia. This sort of language is not unlike what you would expect a neo-nazi to say about jews, that they are inherently a harm and seek to subvert society, because reasons...

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#182

Post by danielscrubs »

aerique wrote: post #108
bjeds wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha I don't know where you're from but Swedish people are often stereotypically bad at both dealing with emotions and resolving conflicts. "Van der" = Gonna guess you are Dutch? Well Swedish people are, as you know well yourself, the opposite of the Dutch in how to handle things. Source: My partner is Dutch.

Haha, could you elaborate on that? That sounds like a fun read. disclaimer: I'm Dutch.

Dutch and Finnish are known for being frank and to the point which is why they are quite well regarded in Sweden. Swedish is more conflict averse, always trying to protect each other and often failing because what happens is that people read in between the lines instead, which is much worse.

disclaimer: I’m Swedish.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#183

Post by Grustaf »

sha1337 wrote: post #181

I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden. >The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen. Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind. Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article): >I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school sys…

Expressen might be as trustworthy as Fox News, but it's not right leaning in any meaningful sense of the word.

As to islamism, you are aware that they recently closed down Vetenskapsskolan because after a number of islamist scandals. For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#184

Post by Grustaf »

alvarlagerlof wrote: post #111
bjeds wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your reply, I didn't expect I'd find a comment from an actual student of these schools here at HN. Your perspective is valuable. If you follow Swedish media you probably know there's a large discussion/controversy right now about high school students (and younger kids) changing their behavior to avoid crime/trouble. For example see this recent article at SVT: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/man-maste…

I'm not one to go to parties drinking or smoking illegal stuff, although this is very common in certain groups. So I can't comment on that. I've actually avoided that on purpose because it would worsen my mental state with my diagnosies. But I guess that criminal stuff would happen in those groups.

It's not related to drinking or smoking, it's about the dangers of being outside in the evening in Sweden nowadays.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#185

Post by notsureaboutpg »

sha1337 wrote: post #181

I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden. >The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen. Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind. Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article): >I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school sys…

Thanks for the context.

I'm always wary of accusing people for having "links to" X or Y bad ideology. Links are so vague and often seem much more nefarious than they are.

For example, if I went to high school with someone, does that "link" me to them? What if, like many people, we were best friends in high school but lost touch later? What if that person works in a business which my brother also works in? What if we sat next to each other at a charity dinner? All of these are "links" but none of them mean that I subscribe to the ideology of the person I'm linked to.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#186

Post by Grustaf »

vagrantJin wrote: post #134
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they have food trucks in Sweden? Maybe students can pool in money and hire a cook or contract with a food truck to provide meals on time. When I was in school back in India..and this was many decades ago...me and my cousins would get hot lunch delivered by my grandparents. But there was this group of kids who had working parents and from nuclear families...and a bunch of them hired a lady to cook meals for 10-12 o…

> Maybe someone from Sweden in HN can run with this as a startup? I like the way you think. In my country the community would open tons of cheap food stalls that could get students decent food. It also happens that simple bean or chicken briyanis were a hit. I guess Im finding it difficult to digest the suggestion of burgers as a lunch meal when food really shouldn't be an issue in SWE. Maybe its embarrasing to not e…

99.9% of Swedish schools have free school cafeterias. It's a deeply ingrained concept that I believe Sweden invented. This school is an extreme outlier.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#187

Post by Grustaf »

imtringued wrote: post #41
corty wrote: post #7

While I agree with the article about the problems of profit-driven schools, the whole situation (and the article in parts) points to a imho bigger problem in most education systems: Profit-driven schools cater to the more able, easier to educate and more intelligent pupils. Why can they do that? Because public schools almost everywhere insist on coeducation of the most and least gifted. This is severely holding back…

>This is severely holding back and limiting the development of gifted children and imho needs to be dealt with. The article describes how for profit schools specifically pick "gifted" (aka easy to teach) children and then cut teaching staff to take the difference as profit. Yes, these students will still get better grades and thus make the for profit school look better than the public school but they absolutely fail…

Schools don't pick students. They can't even discriminate on grades.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#188

Post by danielscrubs »

catears wrote: post #120
FabHK wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know what is meant by "joy grades"? Does it refer to grade inflation (ie nearly everyone getting very good grades)?

The two main ways to get into university in Sweden is through your grades or through a national test (Högskoleprovet ~ The university test). From your grades you calculate a score and then people are accepted into programmes at uni based on that score. The grading has seen a lot of debate over the last 10 years or so from when it changed (IG/G/VG/MVG --> A-F scale). The way things were graded in the old system had na…

Anecdotal but my relative is a teacher. The principal of their school just told them straight up that they need to improve the grades no matter what so they can compete with other schools.

It’s kind of a open secret that if you go to a bad school it will be easier to get a good grade to get into university but harder to pass university.

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#189

Post by sha1337 »

Grustaf wrote: post #183
sha1337 wrote: post #181

I would like to give some context to everyone who doesn't come from Sweden. >The following article [...] appeared in the Swedish publication Expressen. Expressen is a known right-leaning news publisher. They are the Fox News of Sweden, you should keep that in mind. Here is an example of the kind of trash you find in Expressen (taken from the article): >I accuse you, the Sweden Democrats [...] you support a school sys…

Expressen might be as trustworthy as Fox News, but it's not right leaning in any meaningful sense of the word. As to islamism, you are aware that they recently closed down Vetenskapsskolan because after a number of islamist scandals. For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS.

I think truthfulness is a bigger issue than right vs left, if they were truthful I would personally not care about their political leaning.

Expressen is right-leaning though, they may not be far-right (like Avpixlat), but they're certainly leaning right.

>For example, it turned out they had been hiring people returning fighting for ISIS.

They(in plural?) had been hiring people (again in plural?). You have to be accurate here, especially when it comes articles that are demonizing an entire community. Even if it so happened that one employee had links to ISIS, it does not by default make the school administration responsible for what the employee did. For example, if a pedophile teacher gets caught, it's hardly reasonable to blame the school (unless the school administration knew and ignored it).

Re: The Shame of Swedish Education: J’Accuse

#190

Post by Grustaf »

username90 wrote: post #99
FabHK wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, arrogating Émile Zola's battle cry for yourself is in my view overreaching. On the other hand, as Wikipedia notes, "J'accuse! has become a common expression of outrage and accusation against someone powerful", so I think it has become more generic, and doesn't contain the implicit accusation of anti-semitism anymore. > wouldn't we expect it to actually lead to worse results then that of other countries? It mi…

Sweden has had private schools for decades now though, and results are improving since the last reform. Also I don't think private schools is a big deal, good students avoid them since they all have really bad reputation. Nobody will think "Wow, you went to $private_school?" instead it is more like "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?". There are a few exceptions, but only for the few schools that were pri…

> "You went to that school huh, are you an idiot?"

Which schools have this reputation?

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