The new book Dumbing Down – The Crisis of Quality and Equity in a Once-Great School System—and How to Reverse the Trend by Magnus Henrekson and Johan Wennström identifies the core reasons for the present crisis in the Swedish school system with falling knowledge levels, inflated grades, increasing differences between student groups, frustration and distress among teachers and students, to be the emerging dominance of a postmodern social constructivist view of truth and knowledge in combination with a new school market system with both public and private enterprise for-profit schools supported by a tax financed student voucher system unique for Sweden, with the following key message:
- Our assertion that a universal transition to a postmodern social constructivist teaching approach is the main factor explaining the decline in students’ knowledge, as well as the various other problems in the Swedish school system, is supported by the fact that a similar effect can be seen in other countries
- Since the system has impeded schools from competing based on how successful they are at imparting knowledge to their students, competition has steered toward goals other than knowledge acquisition, including generous grading.
- To be clear about our point: “post-truth” schooling and the drive to marketize education are two inde- pendent forces... but they are mutually reinforcing and have in tandem created the negative conditions for teachers and students in Sweden. It was through this marriage with the market system that the aim of the postmodern social constructivist view of knowledge to redirect schools from the purpose of teaching in the classical sense could be fully achieved.
The resolution of the crisis is presented as return to a classical view of objective truth and knowledge in the form of a virtuous circle with the following key elements:
- Good curriculum.
- A good teacher has deep subject knowledge and uses efficient pedagogical methods.
The subject of mathematics has a special role as a core subject of both the modern world of enlightenment carried by classical school mathematics and of the post-modern digital world asking for a reform of school mathematics. The good curriculum for a school mathematics of today thus is a combination of classical analytical mathematics and new digital mathematics as presented on DigiMat supported by Leibniz World of Math. DigiMat shows a way out of the crisis by combining the best elements of both the modern and post-modern world. DigiMat shows a way of reversing the trend! A return to traditional school mathematics is not an option.
DigiMat supports both a classical world view of objective generality ultimately expressed by mathematical symbols in mathematical equations and individualistic digital game worlds created by computer code as digital mathematics. DigiMat as tool for simulation of the world is similar to Garageband and Logic Pro X as tool for music production, in that a basic set of digitally supported tools are combined to rich output.
DigiMat möter Sveriges Ingenjörer i workshop Lidingö skolor 21 April. Watch out!
The main message of the book is that the present school crisis is the result of a take over of post-modern social-constructivist teaching, but is this a correct analysis? Can it be that in fact the crisis is the crisis of a traditional school which no longer delivers in the digital age? If so, then the resolution of the crisis is not a return to the old school, but instead a new synthesis of the best elements from the old system with the tools of new digital world, something like DigiMat?
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