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From: TT
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Photo: Henrik Montgomery / TT
Studying at home is far from a matter of course for all high school students. Stock Photography.
The decision on distance education in Swedish upper secondary schools should have been made earlier. That’s what the scholarly expert and polemicist Per Kornhall says.
– It was an absurd situation.
The Government announces that Sweden’s upper secondary schools are recommended to switch to distance and distance education from Monday to 6 January. For a weekend, the schools will change and, just like this spring, they will keep students out of the classroom to the best of their ability.
In practice, the change doesn’t seem to be a problem, says Per Kornhall, a former high school teacher and teacher council at the National Education Agency and a member of the school committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. He is also a representative of the European Commission’s network of independent school experts.
– They were very fast this spring. We have a huge advantage in Sweden because we have the most digital school in Europe. The digital infrastructure, the digital tier of teacher teams, is incredibly well developed and routines were created this spring.
At the same time, it won’t be easy and will likely mean stress for students with absent and motivational issues.
– The vulnerable are those with difficult socioeconomic conditions at home. It is not that easy if there are not enough computers, and you live in a crowded place, and then you have to do distance education. Where are you going to go during the day? You have no place to retreat, says Kornhall.
No school lunch
Save the Children is doing work in Sweden to help children who are exposed to violence and, in the spring, they were able to see that for many children distance education meant vulnerability. During April – June, the organization received as many calls as throughout 2019.
– The risk of being exposed to violence, honor-related violence and oppression increases, says Erik Ulnes, a sociologist at Save the Children.
At the same time, young people are at risk of lower grades because they are not actively involved in teaching, because a person who sits at home and has five siblings who play with them may have a difficult time answering the teacher’s questions, says Ulnes. .
Another aspect is the school lunch.
– For many families we know who live on the margins, organizing meals for two or three children means an excessively high cost that does not go hand in hand. This spring we had to work to make sure some families had food.
Therefore, schools must ensure that it is possible to collect food at school, says Ulnes.
The municipalities also experienced that fewer reports were made to social services during the spring, and what Save the Children says is not because fewer people are doing it wrong while still trapping children and youth. Therefore, the organization encourages adults to always report if they have an upset stomach about the well-being of a child.
FHM criticized
At the same time, Per Kornhall is of the opinion that distance education should have been introduced much earlier during the second crown wave. On his blog in Skolvärlden, he has harshly criticized the strategy of the Public Health Agency.
– It was an absurd situation. One thought that I have to share with many people is that our Prime Minister has urged us as adults not to meet with any friends. At the same time, I sent a young adult to a school with 1,000 students. It just doesn’t go hand in hand.
Distance education is not a sacred purpose and Sweden does not spend billions on school because it is considered unnecessary, says Per Kornhall. At the same time, the consequences of how teaching was affected in the spring are not entirely clear, he notes. There is an expressed concern but there is no concrete evidence that the ranking has been affected.
– It is clear that it has negative consequences, but somewhere we must make the difference between letting people die. And we’ve crossed that line a long time ago.
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