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<title> Politics and Education </title>
In an article in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Lars Leijonborg and Jan Björklund from the Swedish party Folkpartiet discuss how they would like to change the educational system in Sweden. They say that the Swedish system is among the worst in Europe and compare it to Holland and Denmark. They say we have a lot to learn from other European school systems. Here I will give you my thoughts about some of their ideas.
	Among other things, Leijonborg and Björklund say that the way it is today, Swedish students are treated as if they were completely alike. Everybody is supposed to study the same things, at the same time. This is something they would like to change, and I think it would be quite a good idea. All children are different, and they are not always at the same level. This means, and I think most people agree with me, that they don't get the same chance to get a good result. To let them work in their own pace, and give them assignments that are on "their level" would give much better results. The way it is today, children who can't keep up with the others, often lose their motivation and feel that they can't live up to what is expected of them, and those who work faster than the others also risk becoming less motivated, since they know they could do more. Equality doesn't have to mean that everybody is exactly alike and think exactly the same way.
	What also happens with a system like this one, is that the teachers have to spend much more time with the "weaker" students, and those who are better are supposed to take care of themselves, more or less, which can make them feel as though the teacher doesn't care about their work at all. This way of working helps the students develop individually, in their own way. Those who work fast should be encouraged to do so, and be able to continue instead of "waiting" for the slower students. What could be negative about this is that it becomes much more difficult for the teachers to make sure everybody learns as much as they should.
	In Sweden, students get grades from the eighth school year, at the age of fifteen. The article suggests that grades should instead be given from the fifth school year, when the students are eleven years old, because this makes it easier to discover problems that some students might have quite early in their education, and it would be easier to help them if the help comes as early as possible. Grades could also be a good way to make them more motivated. As Leijonborg and Björklund say, grades from the fifth year give teachers and parents a possibility to discover problems at an early state, so that they are able to help the student to get past the difficulties before they go on to upper secondary school. At the eighth year, it might be too late to put them on the right path again, and they take their difficulties with them to upper secondary.
	Here, I don't feel that I can agree fully with their ideas. Of course they are right in what they say about discovering problems early, but my opinion is that the students are too young, at 11, to be graded. It creates a negative atmosphere and they tend to compete with each other, so that it gets more important to be better than everybody else than to improve their results for their own sake. Another thing is that if they get bad grades when they are so small, they risk losing all motivation and think they are worthless, and this attitude might be hard to get rid of when they get older. This would indeed create an unequal system, where some students get the idea that they aren't good enough at an age when they are too small to understand that this doesn't have to be the case. If a student has difficulties reading, for example, this is discovered quite easily without grades, and at an even earlier state than the fifth year.
	I think Leijonborg and Björklund might have a point with what they say. The Swedish educational system is very different from those of other European countries. School may seem less hard for the students in Sweden than it is, for example, in England, and I agree that there are many things that would be better if the system was changed.
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