Unanticipated problems can only be solved once they emerge.

Some very interesting points made in Sweden Has an Education Crisis, But It Wasn’t Caused by School Choice by Tino Sanandaji.

The issue is that PISA scores for Sweden have declined dramatically in the past decade or so. I have discussed elsewhere some of the limits on the usefulness of PISA scoring. But stipulating the PISA scores, what explains the Swedish decline? The search for an answer is made more difficult by the fact that Sweden has undertaken numerous education reforms in the same time period and has admitted much higher levels of refugees than in the past. So the decline could be explained, at a first order of analysis, by ineffective reforms, by the disruption that comes from reforming, by changing demographic/cultural mix, etc. Many in the US education establishment like to believe that the decline is a result of experimentation with two specific reforms; privatization and vouchers. Sanandaji brings that analysis into question.

I like his description of the teething process of implementing any major new social policy.

To some extent, the childhood ills of the voucher system can be viewed as part of the Hayekian learning process of building entirely new systems — unanticipated problems can only be solved once they emerge.

Sanandaji's analysis:

But in my view, the main culprit was the experiment with radically new pedagogical methods. The Swedish school system used to rely on traditional teaching methods. In recent decades, modern “individualist” or “progressive” pedagogic ideas took hold. The idea is that pupils should not be forced to learn using external incentives such as grades, and children should take responsibility for their own learning, driven by internal motivation. Rote memorization and repetition are viewed as old-fashioned relics. Teacher-led lectures have increasingly been replaced by group work and “research projects.”

Grades have been abolished below the sixth grade, and homework heavily reduced. According to TIMMS (a test similar to PISA), the average hours Swedish students spend doing mathematics homework declined from 2.1 hours per week in 1982 to 1.1 hours in the late 2000s. Despite criticism from teachers, the Swedish school board has ruled that pupils are allowed to have mobile phones and wear caps in class.

The Rousseauian experiment in pedagogic method has caused a collapse in discipline and non-cognitive skills in general. The PISA report shows that Sweden has become an outlier in terms of expressions of non-cognitive skills: “Sweden has the highest proportion of students who arrive late for school among OECD countries,” the report notes. And classroom discipline has declined along with teacher authority: “The disciplinary climate in Swedish classrooms is generally more negative than on average across OECD countries,” PISA writes.

Duke University psychologist Angela Duckworth has shown the importance of perseverance and “grit” for academic success. Students who are not challenged are less likely to develop such traits. The PISA report again: “Students in Sweden reported lower levels of perseverance than students in most other OECD countries.”

Perhaps the single biggest problem is the decline in learning tempo. Once students are used to a slow pace, it becomes hard to demand more. The accumulated effect of reducing the pace of teaching over many years is substantial. The PISA report:

A 15-year-old student in Sweden in a typical study programme receives 741 hours of intended instruction time per year, compared with 942 hours on average across OECD countries.

Non-cognitive skills, voluminous purposeful practice - these are so well known and documented, why don't we rely on them more? We shy away from anything that contradicts our Woebegonian ideal where everyone is above average.