They look lost. Mouths agape. They sometimes glance at their neighbour, but rarely for long. It becomes too painfully obvious that they’re out of their league. Instead, they just look down. At their fresh books. With foreign words. Explaining alien concepts.
And only with a monumental will can they dredge themselves out of such a stupor.
Immigrants is as old a concept as the agricultural revolution some 10’000 years ago. And refugees have been around since the first sword was swung, or spear was thrust. And yet, society hasn’t solved the equation of the fresh-off-the-boat child that is put in the classroom. Unprepared and unsupported.
Under the current educational regime in Sweden, children are expected to catch up. Regardless of their prior knowledge, schooling, or upbringing. Regardless of whether they were ripped out of the mechanized educational centres of communist China or out of a war-torn Syria. The Swedish educational system just pushes them into an age-relevant class and expects them to… muddle along until they catch on. On exclusive occasion, the kids are sequestered in jumbled classes of their own, away from other children, for as long a period as two years.
How the educational system of Sweden expects children that may have, for example, survived a war-torn Syria for years instead of enjoying a formal education to just be able to slip on into their teenage age-bracket classes is beyond me.
It’s ridiculous. It’s cruel. Of course they can’t be expected to keep up with children their own age when, in some cases, they’re years of schooling apart.
And there’s no good reason for it. No good reason other than an administrative one. And an ideological one. It’s easy, easy, to rate a child’s knowledge on how old they are. And it seems egalitarian to do so. As if all children develop at the same pace. As if all children catch on or mature as quick as their peers. It’s not based on reality, but it is an easy short-hand. An incorrect short-hand. And not only immigrant and refugee children suffer from this rule of thumb, although their examples are the most egregious and telling ones. The Swedish educational results, with schools where as much as 80% of students don’t graduate with grades good enough for high school, speak volumes. Because in education, age is really just a number. An arbitrary one. Against which the State weighs a human’s worth.
If you desperately want to discretely quantify knowledge, you could say it works in levels. Not in age-brackets. Once you finish a level, let’s take mathematical addition for example, then you’re ready for the next; multiplication. Because if you don’t have those prerequisite skills, there’s no amount of geometry that can be regurgitated at you that will help you understand the basics.
So why? Why do we organize school like we do? It can’t just be because it’s the easy thing to do, right? Or because it’s unthinkable to regard children as individuals, with individual maturation rates. Not really, although I have no doubt that the easy bit is a big part of it. Another factor is undoubtedly that the State is hungry for new tax revenue rather than continued tax sinks. Schooling costs money. A lot of it. And it generates nothing unless schools shit out new productive members of society on a regular basis. And if children were to lag behind their arbitrary timeline, then the State would slowly start haemorrhaging. The State doesn’t care that the hopelessness and isolation that failed students feel is an even bigger money-sink than proper education. The State is an unthinking behemoth, and it can’t fathom that far ahead. It wants its tax payer serfs, and it wants them now.
What we have, as illustrated by this faulty education system, is a sign. A sign that the State, as far as basic education goes, has not evolved for the benefit of its citizenry, but for its own self. A State that no longer serves, but demands servitude.
A State that throws its children into the pool of knowledge. And if those children can’t swim by the time they get to the deep end, according to the State’s own timetable, they might as well drown.
/Sebastian Lindberg 10/9-2019
WastedWords 