Review and comments by readers (Amazon, 07 Jan 2018) Erik Lidstrom has provided us with a heretical, but brilliant expose of modern education. There is wide agreement that the modern, bureaucratic school system does not work well and is subject to a never-ending cyclical spate of reforms that often make matters worse. By combining economics and evolutionary theory with an intriguing account of the educational system and outcomes before and after government organized schooling, Lidstrom makes a cogent and thoughtful argument for a ground-up, market-based approach to education. No doubt, the thesis will irritate and offend many educators, but this is all the more reason to read the book and seriously reflect on Lidstrom's proposals. --David C. Geary, PhD, curators' professor, Thomas Jefferson Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Missouri. The shortfalls of government-supplied education loom ever larger as time marches on. Considering radical alternatives today, however, violating more than one nostrum of political correctness, Erik Lidstrom takes us beyond such conventionalities to show freedom and competition are a significant part of the answer to the educational crisis of our time. --Samuel Gregg, director of research, Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty. Throw away all those books on how to fix the education system. As Erik Lidstrom shows in this thought-provoking book, full of insights, the only way to fix education is not to fix it. Education is too important to be left to the "education experts," and should be a matter for the real experts - schools, teachers and parents. --Johan Norberg, senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of In Defence of Global Capitalism. About the author Erik Lidstrom holds an MSc and a PhD in physics from Uppsala, Sweden University, as well as an MBA from the Swedish Open University. After doing research during 4 years at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, France, Erik moved in 2000 to the software industry. He has worked in Britain, France, Sweden and Morocco. He has developed a primary interest in complex development processes and organizational issues. Extracts Chap 2, page 26, footnote 6 6. In China, in 1818, there existed two teachers and twenty-four students in higher mathematics in an empire with 360 million inhabitants. (Martzloff 1907, 83; Cosandey 1997, 485). This was of course at a state academy. All private academies had been closed by the authorities in 1625-27 (Cosandey 1997, 481). In general, Imperial Chinese regulations for elementary schools passed artithmetic over in silence. As far as we can tell, the subject was simply not taught (Martzloff 1997, 83) “Arithmetics was reserved for merchants, artisans, and tax collectors, who often seem to have acquired their know-how on the job rather than at school". Chap 5, page 60, footnote 4 4. Until the eleventh century, ulemas (Muslim legal scholars or lawyers) worked as privately employed jurisconsults and searched freely in the sacred texts, something that they were encouraged to do by a Hadith attributed to prophet Mohamed himself (Makdisi 1981, 1-2). The results were hundreds of legal schools of Islam, but in 1267 in Cairo, only four legal scholars were appointed by the authorities, each representing one school. These four schools are those that remain to this day.The other schools were disavowed, abd by about 1300, they had all disappeared. Early in Islam, the jurisconsults were in private practice, often with merchants as clients, in spite of the authorities' attempts to control them by, for example, creating the official role of judge (qadi). In the eleventh century, numerous ulemas refused employment in the newly created state run madrasas (Cosandey 1997, 359-60). But economic pressure gradually reduced them to misery, and the death knell to their independence came in the fourteenth century, in the form of appointed mufti state servants. Soon, the muftis (the pinnacle of the legal hierarchy) all became employed by the prince. The universities in Europe were at first all private and began as law schools and institutions to teach theoogy. Similarly, at the beginning of the nineth century, there existed over five hundreds private schools in the Islamic world that taught law and theology (Cosandey 1997, 358-359). By the end of the eleventh century, they had declined to be replaced by the state-financed madrasahs. Speech by Oscar Hagberg, Civic Coalition, in Lund, Sweden on 08 Feb 2017. On February 8, 2017, Medborgerlig Samling Skåne organized a lecture evening in Lund with Erik Lidström under the title “Give all children a good education – easy, difficult and fast”. Oskar Hagberg reports. Source. Erik Lidström on the decline of Swedish schools and how to reverse it I was terribly disappointed when I started school in 1977. I would have loved to have beautiful handwriting and learned the multiplication table like a breeze. But it ended up being the ugly, functional “SÖ style” (after the Swedish National Board of Education, which pushed it through) and set theory in mathematics, an already condemned pedagogical miracle method, which our old lady couldn’t bear to abandon after she had once been forced to learn it. The rivers of Halland were not even to be thought of. In other words: I would have rather started school in 1947. I wasn't alone in that, but the common interpretation is that we romanticized it. We should be grateful for the "modern" methods. The old school is said to have been just drill and discipline without content. One who questions that image is the classical liberal, physicist, author, debater, etc. Erik Lidström , who on February 8 gave a lecture for Medborgerlig Samling in Lund. We late-borns were really unlucky, Lidström said. We missed out on the world's best school system, which Sweden had until about 1968. Then it went downhill. The essence of Lidström's argument is that teaching is a craft, based on experience and tacit, not even articulate, knowledge. Over-conscious, grandiose reforms are never useful. A well-functioning market economy is the only way to create development, and that is exactly what happened in the private schools of the nineteenth century, where paying parents had a wide range of options nd could quickly transfer their children if they did not receive the education they needed. In this way, what really worked was screened out. The victors write history. That is why it is often mistakenly believed that Swedish school history began with the introduction of primary school in 1842. But already in the seventeenth century, literacy was universal in Sweden. In the cities, long before the public education system became large, private schools emerged. It was here [in those private schools] that the Swedish school was created, and then gradually nationalized. It maintained a high quality until the end of the 1960s. It did so in interaction with the state educational institutions, which were much smaller in terms of the number of students, with roots in the Middle Ages, and which were also products of the market. The eternal liberal lesson also applies to schools: Quality is not one-dimensional and easy to understand. Anyone who thinks they can sit on a school board and figure out what is best for everyone is deluding themselves. Quality is created and assessed in thousands of meetings and agreements between parents and schools, where interests are weighed against each other and paths are found that fit the situation. Just like with the hopeless writing style of the School Board, most new ideas will be bad, but if they are tested on individual schools that risk losing their students, the bad ideas are quickly sorted out. If we had kept the old private school system, the theory of quantity would never have had a chance. The fact that the school continued to be so good after it was nationalized was because it was allowed to remain unchanged. It was not until the post-war social engineers dared to make a first major attack when the unified school was implemented around 1968 – against the will of the teachers and in contradiction to experimental results. A catastrophic loss of knowledge followed. Since then, things have slowly gone downhill. The unified school, that is, that all children should study together until they are sixteen, is an insane idea, says Lidström. Boys in particular are competitive in their teens. Then there must not be just one playing field, that of the theoretical school, because then almost everyone will fail. He sarcastically said that the only good thing the unified school has given us is the aggressive youth music, where the anger from physically acting out boys finds an outlet. The explosion of ADHD diagnoses is also one of the effects. What should we do then? Tear down the whole thing! Lidström suggests. The Swedish school system has today fallen into a death spiral where the lowest-performing students become teachers, who increasingly let teaching revolve around learning something. Instead, they focus on socialization, which children have actually managed without teacher help at all times. Some of these teachers' lowest-performing students then become teachers themselves. We won't even talk about teacher training colleges... A return to the good old state school system would require the dismissal of most teachers and such sweeping reforms that it seems completely impossible. No, Lidström believes the best thing would be to roll back the clock even further: perhaps to 1800, when the Swedish private school system took off and developed. The power of the market can be used again, if only one dares to trust parents with the ability to choose and pay for a school for their children. The choice would be completely free without any requirements for curricula or values. The result would not be the same as then without a school adapted to today's needs. Is it possible? Wouldn't it just be a school for the rich? Not really. Good schools don't have to be expensive giant institutions with a whole staff of officials in addition to the teachers in each class. That's not for the children's sake, but just an example of how public inefficiency takes on a life of its own. Lidström finds his best examples of functioning independent schools in the slums of the Third World, where study places are certainly not expensive and the very poorest get to go for free. But of course it seems completely impossible the way Sweden works today. If these ideas are to contribute to practically feasible policy, one must be able to pick out a few parts at a time. An important lesson is to watch out for independent schools. That is where real quality improvements can happen. Look at the English school! Don't be so sloppy with governance and standardization either. "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible," Lidström quotes Frank Zappa. Whatever the case, Lidström gave an answer to a burning question that should be asked more often: We take it for granted that GDP should increase year after year, but why have we at the same time accepted that Swedish schools are deteriorating year after year? A small improvement in the latest Pisa is pleasing, but not decisive. What most people learned by seventh grade in the old segregated school is not even learned by high school students today. It shouldn't have to be that way, right? I personally think that I wasn't so wrong in longing for 1977 to 1947. Although if you believe Lidström, I should have longed for 1877 even more. Oscar Hagberg Party board member Civic Coalition |
