Keywords

It is well known that laws, regulations, norms, and other formal and informal institutions affect and incentivize individual behavior and human interaction.Footnote 1 The Nobel Prize-winning U.S. economic historian Douglass North even defined institutions as “the humanly devised constraints that shape human interaction.”Footnote 2 Therefore, an explanation of agents’ behavior and the outcome of their joint efforts in an area of study must identify the most relevant institutions and their incentive effects. This is no less true for the educational sector. Thus, in order to account for the deterioration in students’ knowledge and other signs of a malaise in the provision of elementary and secondary education in Sweden, we need to examine the institutional setting of the Swedish school system. That is the task of the remainder of this book. We begin this chapter with a discussion of what we consider to be a critically important, arguably the single most important, institution for the functioning and development of any school system, namely, the stipulated view of knowledge.

Given that there is virtually unanimous agreement today that the goal of a national school system should be to enable students to gain the knowledge and skills necessary not only to sustain themselves but also to flourish and contribute to the advancement of the society in which they are expected to live as adults, the matter may seem simple. However, it is precisely here that differences of opinion appear. There is no consensus on what knowledge should be taught or how it should be taught. School systems, in fact, diverge widely in their perspectives on these issues, causing significant disparities in what students leaving school actually know as well as in the working conditions experienced by teachers.

The divergence boils down to what are essentially two different—indeed, irreconcilable—views of the nature of knowledge. During the period of educational modernization in Sweden and the industrialized world more broadly that we have previously referred to as “the silver age,” it was taken as a given that objective knowledge specific to various fields exists, that it is accessible through systematic study directed by competent teachers, and that it serves as a precondition for the development of a number of important skills. We call this the classical view of knowledge.

The classical view is still predominantly accepted in Asian societies, but many school systems elsewhere in the world have in recent decades come to adopt another view, which, when taken to its most extreme form, considers all knowledge claims to be subjective and ultimately nontransferable from teacher to student. The emphasis is, therefore, on self-learning of content that students themselves deem relevant to their schooling and training in critical thinking, a skill that is assumed to be generic in nature and divorced from the acquisition of domain-specific knowledge. As the next chapter shows in some detail, this newly emerging view of knowledge was in some ways anticipated by the ideas of the progressive pedagogical reform movement of the 1930s and 1940s. However, it is more rightly identified as a postmodern social constructivist stance, so we use that term throughout the book.

We define “view of knowledge” in terms of the Polish philosopher Ludwik Fleck’s concept of “thought style,”Footnote 3 which served as an important inspiration for Thomas Kuhn’s later concept of “paradigm.” Thought styles, simply put, are manners of thinking that link the members of a particular social unit, a “thought collective,” to draw on Fleck’s terminology, and determine how they interpret phenomena relevant to their interests. We thus regard views of knowledge as thought styles that shape how individuals (for example, scholars, pedagogues, and education policymakers) belonging to different thought collectives within the broadly conceived field of education understand what knowledge is and what formal education can and should do to help students acquire it.

Views of knowledge are informal institutions, but they can be and are, in fact, codified into explicit rules that determine the course a school system takes, such as national curricula, teaching instructions, and grading criteria. That is why we suggest that the adopted view of knowledge is one of the most fundamental institutions of schooling. It is also, we argue, a key determinant of the success of the educational system. Indeed, depending on which of the two main conflicting views of knowledge is emphasized, the system will produce either high-quality education or the kind of problems outlined in the previous chapters. For us, it is clearly the classical view that gives rise to the first outcome, while the alternative view leads down an educationally destructive path.

We return to that argument later in the book; for now, we examine the different views of knowledge and their implications for pedagogical practice in schools. We first more fully present the classical view of knowledge and then describe the postmodern social constructivist view that has unseated and replaced the former perspective in much of contemporary education.

The Classical View

Our species, Homo sapiens, would not have been able to dominate Earth if our innate ability for learning had not been extraordinary.Footnote 4 However, if we actually have such natural talent for learning, why do we make people spend most of their youth in classrooms? According to adherents of the classical view of knowledge, there is a straightforward reason, although it may have been intuited for a long time rather than clearly formulatedFootnote 5: namely, that formal education is a technology developed and applied to compensate for what the human mind is innately able to do only poorly.

One does not need to attend school to learn how to walk, run, play, recognize the objects and the people one depends on, speak well enough to function within the family and among close neighbors, or immediately tell how many items there are in a set of up to four.Footnote 6 Learning and perfecting such skills is typically done voluntarily and found enjoyable by children because it is a biologically primary task. In other words, the human brain is designed to spontaneously learn to perform this task. However, learning to master knowledge and skills such as reading and writing, arithmetic, and science is a very different matter.Footnote 7 Those kinds of knowledge and skills are biologically secondary in nature since they are not normally applied in the everyday life of a child and in any case were discovered only fairly recently in the history of our species. As a result, an innate talent to acquire them in the same effortless way has not yet evolved—if it ever will.Footnote 8

Attaining biologically secondary knowledge and skills requires deliberate practice, and since it does not come naturally to human beings, the learning process is not always pleasurable.Footnote 9 On the contrary, we learn, for example, a mathematical skill only with great effort, and we have to repeat and repeat and repeat this new skill before it can become automatic and second nature. We can then use it to learn a more advanced skill in the same area, and so on. In the classical view, the purpose of schools is to provide an arena for the acquisition of such hard-won, biologically secondary knowledge and skills. As the Australian educational psychologist John Sweller writes, “We invented schools in order to teach biologically secondary knowledge because, unlike primary knowledge, it is unlikely to be acquired without the functions and procedures found in educational establishments.”Footnote 10

Particularly important in this context, according to the classical view, is the teacher’s explicit instruction in the attainment of biologically secondary knowledge and skills and his or her encouragement of students to practice with diligence and perseverance.Footnote 11 The reason is that humans “have evolved to learn [biologically secondary information] from others.”Footnote 12 Since our ability to do so is a biologically primary skill that is lacking in most other animals, explicit instruction is considered by far the most natural and efficient teaching method.Footnote 13Cognitive load theory suggests that the alternative model for learning, in which novice students are expected to find and rehearse biologically secondary information themselves, leads to the working memory quickly becoming overloaded.Footnote 14 As a result, one summary explains, “focus is lost, the mind wanders, and the task is abandoned.”Footnote 15 Disturbance of the working memory can, as was discussed in the previous chapter, also arise from perceived threats to safety, which is why the classical view of knowledge emphasizes the importance of structure and peace in the classroom for achieving successful learning outcomes, with the teacher as a social leader and norm setter.Footnote 16

The terms knowledge and skills are deliberately combined in this account because, in the classical view, they are tightly interwoven. This belief is supported by research showing that skills, in fact, are dependent on domain-specific knowledge. As the U.S. educationalist E.D. Hirsch, an emblematic exponent of the classical view of knowledge, notes, “The domain specificity of skills is one of the firmest and most important determinations of current cognitive science.”Footnote 17 Even as basic a skill as reading comprehension requires domain knowledge, as has been demonstrated by studies showing that students who are considered “poor readers” on the basis of scores on reading tests outperform “good readers” in cases where the former happen to have more knowledge about the subject matter.Footnote 18 Interestingly, from an equity point of view, this also remains true when IQ is taken into account.Footnote 19 The evidence thus suggests that anyone’s reading comprehension will quickly degenerate when a topic is unfamiliar, regardless of the text’s complexity.Footnote 20 Consequently, it is logical that other, more advanced skills, such as problem solving and critical thinking, have also proven to require large amounts of domain-specific knowledge or even expertise in an area.Footnote 21

Against this background, adherents of the classical view of knowledge reason that the key to developing cross-topic reading comprehension and other vital skills is having, in Hirsch’s words, a “well-stocked mind.”Footnote 22 Hence, schools should offer students a broad curriculum. According to the classical view, such a curriculum should be organized around traditional subject areas. Moreover, it should be detailed and sequenced in a cumulative manner to ensure that students learn the foundations of a subject before proceeding to subsequent levels. The design of the curriculum is thus considered a critical success factor, and research corroborates this notion. A well-thought-out curriculum and high-quality teaching materials can, in fact, be even more important to student learning than teacher quality.Footnote 23

What underlies the classical view of the curriculum is the idea that humanity through scientific inquiry has discovered and developed a body of knowledge about how the world is constituted and how it works that young students need to master, or at least have some basic understanding of, if they are to successfully live in that world. Such knowledge, for example, the rudimentary principles of physics and biology, is held to be objectively true, given the strength of the evidence in its favor that scientists have collected by observation and experimentation and by formulating and testing different hypotheses.Footnote 24 By virtue of being true, in this sense, that body of knowledge has spread to the point that it has become shared or, in Hirsch’s term, “communal.”Footnote 25 It is, in other words, taken for granted that everyone has possession of it. Thus, to be ignorant of communal knowledge is to be an outsider unable to comprehend, build on, or challenge what others know. Therefore, schools must, according to the classical view, teach communal knowledge to every student.

Hannah Arendt crystallized this point in her 1954 essay “Crisis in Education” when she stated, “[Education] is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”Footnote 26 The same principle applies not just to the verifiable facts of the hard sciences and the tools invented to make use of them (e.g., mathematical methods) but also to communal knowledge that is enabling for the individual within the national context and essential to cultural identity, such as language grammar and other culturally shared concepts as well as literature, history, and geography. Even ethical concepts that the individual can rely on to make normative judgments are part of this communal knowledge. Without it, adherents of the classical view argue, students will not be able to fully take part in and help renew the society that they have been born into. As Arendt observed, “because [the world] continuously changes its inhabitants, it runs the risk of becoming as mortal as they. To preserve the world against the mortality of its creators and inhabitants, it must be constantly set right anew.”Footnote 27 To fulfill this task, every new generation must be introduced to the knowledge of the old world.

The reader may be forgiven for thinking that this classical view of knowledge is widely accepted in educational systems throughout the world, but that is not so. Instead, a completely contradictory view of the nature of knowledge, pedagogy, and curricular principles has become much more influential in educational circles.

The Contradictory View

This is the postmodern social constructivist view, to which we now turn our attention. Postmodernism as a philosophical movement can be understood as “a reaction to and rejection of modernity,”Footnote 28 meaning, not least, its foundation in Enlightenment ideals such as reason and science.Footnote 29 Postmodern theorists have, from the late 1960s onward, claimed that these ideals are not as reliable, valid, and unbiased as they may seem. On the contrary, they should be regarded as inevitably partial and highly subjective “metanarratives,”Footnote 30 which, in their attempt to sweepingly explain the world, as postmodernism sees it, are comparable to normative “grand theories” such as Christianityor Marxism. The “knowledge” and “truths” that the purportedly scientific narratives have produced are, therefore, not truths at all but rather “dominant discourses” or “regimes of truth.”Footnote 31 In other words, they are nothing but hegemonic ways of speaking about things.

As the use of such terms suggests, postmodernism believes that what is regarded as known and true by modern, conventional standards is inextricably linked to power. Indeed, one of the most significant contributors to postmodern thought, Michel Foucault, explicitly preferred to refer to knowledge as “power-knowledge.”Footnote 32 The power in this context is perceived to be held and wielded by what postmodernism considers to be privileged cultures and groups, principally Western culture and white, heterosexual men.Footnote 33 However, these groups exercise power not straightforwardly and visibly from above, postmodernism argues, but quite subtly and insidiously through language—through assertions of knowledge or through “expectations of civility and reasoned discourse, appeals to objective evidence, and even rules of grammar and syntax.”Footnote 34

Because of the indirect and nebulous character of this system of oppression, postmodern theorists claim that we all more or less unconsciously participate in and perpetuate it through our habits of speaking and thinking. Hence, according to postmodernists, the only way to escape and dismantle the system is to scrutinize and resist the language that is widely accepted as normal and to challenge or, in the French postmodern philosopher Jacques Derrida’s term, “deconstruct” favored discourses.Footnote 35 A key aspect of this proposed “hermeneutics of suspicion”Footnote 36 is the rejection of all established and generally acknowledged boundaries, categories, and hierarchies, which postmodernism regards not only as arbitrary and thus illegitimate but also as operating in the service of power.Footnote 37

The epistemological basis for these beliefs is social constructivism. There are, we should note, different varieties of social constructivism.Footnote 38 Indeed, as noted in a seminal article by the U.S. philosopher of education D.C. Phillips, social constructivism has “many faces,”Footnote 39 but, for the sake of clarity, it is useful to distinguish broadly between two main versions: mild and radical social constructivism.Footnote 40 The former version, for example, holds that many expressions of human thinking and behavior, such as language, gestures, and interpretations of different objects and phenomena, are collectively constructed and influenced by nonuniversal cultural factors.Footnote 41 Radical social constructivism, on the other hand, goes so far as to deny our ability to reach objective truth, and it is this strand that informs—indeed, has merged with—postmodern theory.Footnote 42

In contrast to both its milder cousin and the classical view of knowledge, radical social constructivism does not believe that we can come to know how the world is, or most likely is, constituted through rational reasoning and the empirical, evidence-based scientific method. The reason is that radical social constructivism, at the very least, holds that truth claims cannot be measured against an objective reality because such a reality will always be unknowable due to our inherently partial perspectives. As one account of this radical epistemology explains, “The scientific method, in particular, is not seen as a better way of producing and legitimizing knowledge than any other, but as one cultural approach among many, as corrupted by biased reasoning as any other.”Footnote 43 However, other interpretations suggest that radical social constructivism is even more uncompromising than that, positing that objects and phenomena can, in fact, change depending on the ways in which we think and talk about them and how we choose to determine knowledge and truth.Footnote 44 The conclusion is nevertheless the same, namely, that there are no real truths.

This reliance on radical social constructivist epistemology is what enables postmodernists to claim, as we have seen, that the quest to establish knowledge is nothing more than an attempt to further the power of dominant groups. It also explains why postmodernists argue that we should interrogate the shared language and concepts of society and subvert traditionally understood boundaries, such as the boundary between the objective and the subjective.Footnote 45 Moreover, this radically social constructivist epistemological underpinning leads postmodernists to take a very specific view of teaching and education.

Perhaps the most elementary and important principle in this view is that the students themselves—not the teacher—should direct the learning process in the classroom. The reasoning is that because there are no objectively existing facts, there is no knowledge that can be legitimately transferred from teacher to student. Any attempt by a teacher to do so would, in effect, be an act of indoctrination and unwarranted social control,Footnote 46 as would any effort to correct children’s mistakes or maintain a structured classroom environment conducive to learning in the classical sense.Footnote 47 Similarly, because there is no way to objectively measure what students know, traditional assessment and grading practices are considered to be inherently judgmental and ideological.Footnote 48

Instead, the postmodern social constructivist view of teaching holds, students must be free to determine their own knowledge and reality, building on personal life experiences rather than culturally prescribed truths, and find their own ways of studying and monitoring their progress. Students should, in this view, also be encouraged to independently deconstruct dominant discourses in different fields—science, history, art, etc.—through collaborative verbal discussions and the development of critical thinking. In contrast to the classical view, critical thinking is here regarded as a general skill that can be acquired, and indeed exercised, without possessing domain-specific knowledge, for instance, through comparing diverse sources of information, evaluating arguments, and exposing hidden agendas.Footnote 49

It follows that the postmodern social constructivist view of teaching does not recognize the necessity of a detailed curriculum organized around traditional subject areas that every student is expected to learn in a particular order. On the contrary, all such curricula are considered biased and oppressive.Footnote 50 Instead, students should be allowed to work with content that is personally meaningful and interesting to them. In other words, this view has little time for Hirsch’sand Arendt’s concept of “communal knowledge”; its focus is, perhaps not solely but primarily, on what the individual subjectively values. The postmodern social constructivist view does allow for a curriculum to be used. However, it should not be organized along subject lines and in a hierarchical, cumulative way but—in line with postmodernism’s emphasis on blurring boundaries—should rather aim to transgress and undermine the conventional demarcations between subjects and break down their internal structures.Footnote 51

Ultimately, and to end this section, the postmodern social constructivist view is a complete negation of the classical view with which we began this chapter. In the next two chapters, we show how, step by step, it became the dominant thought style of the Swedish educational system, resulting in fundamental changes in teaching methods and the working conditions of schoolteachers.

In Sum

In this chapter, we juxtapose two very different views of knowledge. According to what we call the classical view, the purpose of formal schooling is to give students the kind of valuable knowledge and skills, including relevant knowledge of the wider culture in which they are expected to spend their lives as adults, that they normally cannot acquire in any other way. Since the world a child is born into is so different from the one humankind has been exposed to in all but a tiny part of its evolutionary history, it is particularly important to provide students with the cognitive tools necessary to survive that differ the most from innate human intuitions, such as reading and writing ability and more advanced knowledge in, for example, economics, biology, and mathematical statistics.

The postmodern social constructivist view, on the other hand, rejects the existence of objective and neutral knowledge. Proponents of this view also tend to reject ordered thinking and the structure and hierarchy of knowledge within disciplines. In the context of schooling, this translates to, among other things, a rejection of the primacy of the teacher in the learning process and a preference for student-directed pedagogy, the mixing or breaking up of disciplines, and an emphasis on developing generic critical thinking rather than on acquiring domain-specific knowledge.

Proponents of both views believe, of course, that it is desirable for students to develop interpersonal skills, creativity, and critical thinking. The contentious issue is not whether such abilities are desirable per se but what means are most effective for acquiring them. Proponents of the classical view maintain that such skills are acquired by systematic and cumulative learning following a detailed and sequenced curriculum organized around traditional subject areas. Since the postmodernist social constructivist view rejects the structure imposed by such a detailed and sequenced curriculum, these desired abilities must be acquired through direct training decoupled from a systematic, knowledge-based curriculum.

Depending on which view of knowledge becomes institutionalized in a country’s educational system, the system will either produce high-quality education or highly problematic learning conditions. This issue is further elaborated upon in the remainder of the book.