Who Benefits from a National Curriculum?

My father, a middle school teacher, more than once came home from work and sighed, "Now they've decided to reinvent the wheel again." In Sweden in the 1970s and 80s, "new" and "ground-breaking" pedagogical waves swept over the school system with mind-numbing regularity. Experienced teachers joked that the goal of education bureaucrats was to "make sure all students were equally ignorant."

By the time my father retired, his bookshelf sported at least four different nationally determined Teaching Plans, containing standards, curricula, pedagogy, and value systems to be used and taught. The idea of a national curriculum has not been the subject of extensive discussion in Sweden. This is hardly surprising. Sweden makes no excuses for wanting a streamlined education system that produces a citizenry with homogenous values and ways of thinking. That is, students should not only learn the same curriculum; they should also come out of the mandatory 9-year education system all espousing the same, centrally chosen value system. A value system that, by the way, does not include the concept of "individual freedom." Joakim Landahl, a researcher at the Department of Pedagogy and Didactics at Stockholm University, describes Swedish education like this in his blog:

The history of Swedish education is permeated with copycats. The desire for independent thinking has often been superceded by the thinking of a thought that somebody else already thought. Different ideologies and ideas have been connected to one's own brain, like a type of artificial intelligence. The question of why a certain type of teaching is advocated has often been answered in one of the following ways:

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Because God said so. Because Joseph Lancaster says so. Because that's how it's done in Prussia. Because the school inspector says so. Because that's how they do it in the high schools. Because the education commission of 1946 says so. Because democracy demands it. Because science has concluded it's the best way. Because the curriculum plan has determined so. Because that's how we've always done it. Because that's how they do it in Finland. (My translation)

Even setting aside the issue of students' individual interests and needs, a big problem with a national curriculum is that it centralizes power. Centralized power over education makes it almost irresistible for politicians to put their fingerprint on the curriculum - which also means a very small number of politicians can cause an awful lot of damage in a very short period of time by meddling with curriculum for the entire country. And in Sweden, parents don't have much of a choice. Private schools, partially financed by tuition, are very few. Even the option most similar to American charter schools, introduced in 1992, does not have complete freedom to choose curriculum. Homeschooling is not just discouraged, but illegal. A Swedish family that emigrated to Finland in order to be able to homeschool their children[i] was fined the equivalent of $15,000 for their crime - after having already left the country. Another family, about to emigrate to India, was forcibly removed from their airplane seats, and their child put in a foster home. The parental crime? Attempting to homeschool[ii]. Whenever politicians want to centralize power to control what and how our children learn, we need to ask the question why. Beyond the claims of equal opportunity and equal treatment for all - who really stands to gain from a few people in Washington D.C. having the power over all of our children? A Commentary by Christina Holmgren-Larson [1] [url=http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressreleases/homeschooling-family-fined-15-000-usd-by-the-swedish-supreme-court-895446]http://www.mynewsdesk.com/se/pressreleases/homeschooling-family-fined-15-000-usd-by-the-swedish-supreme-court-895446[/url] [ii] [url=http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Sweden/201212110.asp]http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Sweden/201212110.asp[/url]