Dumbing Down

Front matter

Magnus Henrekson Johan Wennström

Dumbing Down

The Crisis of Quality and Equity in a Once-Great School System—and How to Reverse

Preface

In many Western countries, school systems are in deep crisis. Average results are disappointing, differences across schools and neighborhoods are increasing, and a student’s family background and gender have become more decisive for how well he or she fares. Under these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the attractiveness of the teaching profession has fallen, making it increasingly difficult to recruit academically gifted and pedagogically talented teachers.

At the same time, the need for well-educated and knowledgeable citizens is greater than ever. The challenges to be dealt with in the decades to come are huge. The aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, an aging population, increasing inequality, and a looming health crisis are a few prime examples. The solutions to these problems, and the advancement of the exceedingly complex and technologically advanced societies that we have created and depend on, require a highly skilled workforce, judicious stewardship, and citizens equipped with effective models and tools to understand and interpret reality.

The good news is that there is now broad consensus that high-quality education is crucial not only because of the need for human capital but also in its own right. The latter aspect is crucial for ensuring that future generations of adults are provided with opportunities to discover their own callings and lead satisfactory lives in productive interaction with their fellow human beings as well as preserve and further the culture they have inherited.

y vi PREFACE

How should high-quality education best be achieved? What are the recipes for success, why have so many countries experienced setbacks, and what should be done to escape the current predicament? Is more money the way forward? More competition and pluralism? More centralization and tighter regulation?

To shed light on and, in our view, provide a large part of the answer to these fundamental questions, we offer an in-depth analysis of Sweden’s experience. The Swedish school system has gone through extraordinary swings in education policies, regulatory frameworks, and national curricula. These include a radical marketization of primary and secondary schooling that is currently unparalleled in any wealthy Western country.

In this book, we draw heavily on many years of our own research published in peer-reviewed journals, Johan’s Ph.D. thesis, and Magnus’s interdisciplinary project involving a professor of neuroscience (Martin Ingvar), a humanities professor (Inger Enkvist), and a Ph.D. student in the history of ideas and sciences (Ingrid Dunér, formerly Wallgren) as well as numerous popular essays and books in Swedish.

Numerous friends and colleagues, most importantly Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, Henrik Jordahl, Glenn Nielsen, Johan Tralau, and Mark Weiner have helped us develop our thinking on the many themes covered in this book and/or commented on earlier versions of the manuscript. Three anonymous reviewers and our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Wyndham Hacket Pain, have helped us correct remaining weaknesses.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Catarina and Sven Hagströmer Foundation, Jan Wallanders och Tom Hedelius stiftelse, the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation, and the research program The Economics of the Service Sector at the Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN).

Finally, it is worth mentioning that this book, and the research it builds on, was produced during perhaps the darkest days of the Swedish school system since the 1960s and early 1970s. As we conclude the writing of the book, there are some hopeful signs of improvement. However, that improvement was made possible only because of a limited and reluctant return to the very pedagogical techniques we suggest in these pages.

Stockholm, Sweden Magnus Henrekson September 2021 Johan Wennström

Contents

1 Introduction: The Rise and Puzzling Fall of the Swedish Educational System The Miracle Sweden”s Educational Crisis The Purpose of the Book Outline

2 The Silver Age of Swedish Education The Pedagogy of the Old School System The Teachers In Sum

3 Educational Performance in Swedish Schools—What

Chapter 1

Introduction: The Rise and Puzzling Fall of the Swedish Educational System

THE MIRACLE

In the half-century before 1914, Sweden experienced an extraordinary economic surge that was sustained over nearly a hundred years. Due to a long-term rate of growth surpassing that of virtually all other nations, the country spectacularly transformed itself from an impoverished agrarian society—indeed, one of the poorest in Europe—to one of the richest and technologically most advanced industrialized countries in the world.! All Swedish citizens, including those belonging to the lower social classes, enjoyed the fruits of this extremely rapid economic progress in terms of a significantly improved standard of living.?

What prompted this miraculous turnaround? According to the economic historian Lars G. Sandberg, Sweden’s takeoff during the second half of the 1800s would not have been possible without a high-quality system of schooling. Sandberg writes, “Mid-nineteenth century Sweden had a strikingly large stock of human and institutional capital. ... Sweden was a poor but sophisticated country.”*

Literacy was common as early as the late 1600s, in no small part because Swedish Lutheran priests were responsible by law for ensuring that every young person in their parish was able to read religious works l See, e.g., Henrekson, Jonung, and Stymne (1996, p. 242). ? See, e.g., Gardlund (1942); Lewin (1967). 3 Sandberg (1979, p. 225).

© The Author(s) 2022 1 M. Henrekson and J. Wennström, Dumbing Down, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3_1 and even to write.* Crucially for the success of this educational mission, according to Sandberg, the Swedish clergy was numerous, university trained, and composed to an unusually high degree of descendants of the peasant population it was charged with tutoring. Thus, “the countryside was covered by influential educated persons, perhaps half of them no more than two generations away from peasant status, whose legal duty and ideological convictions required them to assure the universal literacy of their flocks.”°

Another significant factor was Sweden’s long history of appreciation for learning. Writing in 1631, the seventeenth-century mathematician Anders Bure observed that the inhabitants of the sparsely populated northern parts of the country were “so fond of letters that, although public schools are very few, nevertheless the literate instruct the others with such enthusiasm that the greatest part of the common people and even the peasants are literate.”°

Sweden was the most literate country in Europe by 1850, with only about a 10 percent rate of adult illiteracy. By this time, formal schooling was also rapidly becoming widespread, implying that the ability to read primarily religious texts and write was accompanied by other knowledge.” “By the late 1860s, at the latest,” Sandberg notes, “Sweden had a system of universal elementary education, and the supporting structure of teacher-training institutions, in full operation.”® Hence, Sandberg argues that when industrialization began, the highly literate and knowledgeable Swedish workforce could seize new opportunities, including technological advancements, with superior skill and determination. In combination with the liberalization of trade and other areas, Sweden’s economic development thus “took off like a rocket.”?

This story is not commonly known because ever since the publication in 1936 of the U.S. journalist Marquis Child’s book Sweden: The

4 Several recent studies have established a direct connection between Protestantism and human capital accumulation. See, e.g., Becker and Woessman (2009, 2010) and Boppart, Falkinger, and Grossmann (2014).

6 As quoted in Cipolla (1969, p. 54). 7 Johansson (2009).

1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE AND PUZZLING FALL ... 3

Middle Way, many foreign observers of Sweden have attributed the country’s socially inclusive economic growth to the expansion of the Social Democratic welfare state.! However, as we have suggested here, this analysis overlooks the fundamental causes of Sweden’s economic takeoff and expansion in which everyone prospered.!! The crucial feature that Sweden exhibited was, in fact, its uniquely large and evenly distributed stock of human capital even before the onset of rapid industrialization and modernization in the late 1860s. Compared to other European countries at the time, Sweden, in this sense, enjoyed a “free ride.?!2

In the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Swedish immigrants also fared better in the job market than other European national groups (as well as native-born white U.S. citizens),!? which is strong evidence that Sweden’s high human capital levels were, indeed, a decisive factor in the country’s sudden economic transformation. The rise of the welfare state in later years ultimately had far less to do with it than is customarily assumed.

If education was the key to growth and the great equalizer in Sweden, then the recent decline of the Swedish educational system should be cause for serious concern about the country’s future. We have therefore written this book, which examines the symptoms and causes of this decline as well as the lessons to be drawn from it for Sweden and other similar nations.

After providing a brief overview of the problems with regard to schooling in Sweden, as well as the history we explore in later chapters, we return to the purpose and outline of the book.

SWEDEN’S EDUCATIONAL CRISIS

The heritage of the “impoverished sophisticates,” as Sandberg calls the poor but knowledgeable peasantry in Sweden, survived well into the 1950s.!* In the general population, particularly in the working and lower

10 See Childs (1936) and more recently, e.g., Sachs (2006).

ll As shown by Roine and Waldenström (2008), Swedish income distribution was unusually even as far back as 1920, i.e., long before the introduction of the redistributive tax and transfer systems.

middle classes, a strong sense remained that classical knowledge was essential and that the individual’s successful mastery of it contributed to a national project of modernization. Schools also generally reflected these values and encouraged students, even those of humbler backgrounds, to pursue careers in science and in professions requiring higher education. However, there were also competing forces at work.

After World War II, the significance of classical knowledge and the traditional instructive pedagogy in Swedish schools was openly questioned by public intellectuals and Social Democratic politicians. It was, in the words of an influential 1948 government report on the future of schooling in Sweden, “increasingly more obvious how seldom acquired knowledge can be considered fixed.”!® The school system of Nazi Germany was also grossly misinterpreted to justify a view that in addition to being obsolete, the teaching of classical knowledge could potentially be subversive to democracy.!°

It was therefore determined that the main purpose of public education henceforth should be to help students develop the (perceived) general ability of critical thinking, a “democratic” mindset, and the social skills to make friends across class and ability tiers. In line with this new philosophy of education, which was written into national curricula and other governing documents of the school system, it was deemed appropriate to stipulate that the responsibility for schooling should be transferred step by step from the teachers to the students themselves.

Despite a determined effort in the postwar years and the 1960s and 1970s to radically transform the content and methods of education, the Swedish school system remained rather impervious to change and continued, for a long time, to be relatively good. In fact, when large-scale comparative international testing of students’ knowledge began in the mid-1990s with the first worldwide TIMSS assessment in mathematics and science in 1995, Swedish students in the final year of secondary education came out on top in science and second in mathematics (the Netherlands was first). Swedish students also outperformed U.S. students across the entire ability distribution.

Moreover, in the first cycle of the OECD’s PISA survey, measuring reading ability and mathematics and science proficiency, in 2000, Swedish

15 SOU 1948:27 (p. 148). 16 See Heller Sahlgren and Wennstrém (2020).

1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE AND PUZZLING FALL ... 5 students performed above the international average. It seemed that Sweden's school system was one of the best performing and most equitable and, simultaneously, a model for privatization given that Sweden in the 1990s had implemented the most extensive and liberal voucher system in the world. However, more than a decade of manifestations of deep-seated and overlooked problems followed.

Sweden’s performance in international assessments began to steadily deteriorate. For example, in the TIMSS study, Swedish average results fell by 56 points between 1995 and 2011, which was the largest decline among all participating countries. Despite the well-known deficiencies in the U.S. school system, U.S. students now outperformed Swedish students across the entire distribution in mathematics. Perhaps most alarmingly, the decline was relatively greater for students at the bottom of the ability distribution, who had previously fared comparatively well in the Swedish educational system. Mirroring the development observed for the TIMSS, the Swedish PISA results also progressively worsened until a low point was reached in the 2012 survey. The overall score was well below the OECD average, and in each area of PISA, i.e., reading, mathematics, and science, only three OECD countries performed worse than Sweden.

Paradoxically, during the very period in which the TIMSS and PISA results fell sharply, the average merit rating in the final year of elementary school markedly improved. In other words, the worse Swedish students performed in international knowledge assessments, the more their grades improved. This incongruous evolution of test results and grades can be explained only by widespread grade inflation in schools.

There were numerous other signs of trouble. It became clear that Sweden was facing a crisis in the teaching profession. A survey found that only five percent of Swedish teachers deemed that their work was considered prestigious, and barely half of the respondents agreed that they would choose the same occupation again.!7 In recent years, many teachers have left the profession, and the dropout rate from teacher-training programs has skyrocketed due to dissatisfaction. Moreover, there have been symptoms of a deep malaise among students, including the highest rate of truancy in the OECD and significantly rising rates of mood disorders and ADHD diagnoses.

In sum, something happened in the run-up to the 2000s that negatively affected educational achievement, grading practices, teacher satisfaction, and student well-being. No comprehensive policy response has yet been formulated because there is no consensus among politicians or scholars on how the problems arose, let alone how to resolve them. However, we argue that one potent force, caused by the combination of two seemingly unrelated factors, cuts across all these concerns, offering both an explanation for the challenges to educational quality in Sweden and the prescriptions for addressing them.

THE PURPOSE OF THE BOOK

As we have suggested, Sweden no longer offers an example of a high-quality and equitable school system, as particularly liberal-minded observers of Sweden have tended to believe. Nor does it offer an exemplary model for privatizing education, as advocates of school vouchers and school competition have often claimed. The purpose of this book is to explain these puzzling outcomes.

Our analysis is a novel one. We argue that the origin of Sweden”s educational decline is attributable to a phenomenon that we refer to as “post-truth” schooling; that is, an education based on a postmodern social constructivist view of truth and knowledge, the antecedents of which can be found in the education policies of the postwar decades. This view contends that knowledge is socially constructed and fluid, as opposed to being mostly objective and reliable, and therefore is impossible to transfer from teacher to student.

“Post-truth” schooling matured into its current form slowly but steadily. By the early to mid-1990s, it had become the ruling ideological paradigm of the educational system. (For cultural and institutional reasons, explained later in the book, it was not possible to accomplish the desired paradigm shift before that point in time.) These educational ideas were then, in a highly idiosyncratic fashion, combined with the concurrent marketization of education. This combination led to a shift in focus not only in theory, but also in practice, away from classical knowledge in schools. Ultimately, this resulted in a loss of dignity and self-worth for teachers and a lacking sense of direction for students, causing them psychological distress. The chief mechanism was the creation of powerful incentives for both public and independent voucher schools to compete in dimensions other than educational quality. To be clear about our point:

1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE AND PUZZLING FALL ... 7

“post-truth” schooling and the drive to marketize education are two independent forces, but as we will show in subsequent chapters, 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.

Advocates of the current system will no doubt claim that this argument ignores other important and complex processes, and other scholars will propose alternative explanations for the decline in educational quality. However, in our judgment, the stipulated view of knowledge is the most crucial institution of any school system, from which virtually everything else is derived. If there are deficiencies in this regard, there will be ripple effects on the content of curricula and the pedagogy used as well as on the behavior of the various agents involved in the educational system, including students, parents, teachers, school principals, school owners, the central government, and the concerned government agencies. A telling example pertains to the large immigration to Sweden in recent years. It may well be the case that the increase in the share of foreign-born students “mechanically” explains a part of the fall in students’ knowledge, as at least one study has suggested,!8 but in an appropriate institutional setting they would not necessarily have performed worse than Swedish students.!? Against this background, a focus on the stipulated view of knowledge must be at the heart of any viable analysis of major weaknesses in school systems. Likewise, a successful reform strategy to improve the quality of education must take this factor prominently into account. In Sweden’s case, we argue that a paradigm shift in the stipulated view of knowledge has the potential to yield radical improvement.

Our book adds to previous attempts to study the effects of postmodern social constructivist learning approaches on the quality of education

18 According to Heller Sahlgren (2015a), 29 percent of the overall decline in the average PISA score from 2000 to 2012 can be explained by the change in student composition.

19 There is now considerable evidence regarding which teaching methods are efficient, and research shows that by using these methods children from underprivileged environments can also perform well. See, e.g., Chabrier, Cohodes, and Oreopoulos (2016), Fryer and Dobbie (2013), and Woessman (2013).

and students” knowledge in other societies—for example, the Canadian province of Québec, the United Kingdom, Finland, and France.?? However, with its amalgamation of “post-truth” schooling and a firm commitment to voucher schools and school competition, Sweden offers a unique opportunity to study this subject. The consequences of combining institutionalized postmodernism with full-fledged marketization of education have not previously been examined in detail. Our analysis is, therefore, pioneering and shows that this combination negatively affects the quality of education, suggesting that caution is necessary for countries that have a tradition of postmodern social constructivist pedagogy and are now considering implementing or expanding market-based school reforms.

OUTLINE

Following this introductory chapter, the rest of the book consists of eight chapters. While we do not claim that there has ever been a golden age in Swedish education, we do believe that there was a “silver age” that preceded the present problems and began approximately in the second half of the nineteenth century. This history is presented in Chapter 2.

In Chapter 3, we provide a detailed presentation of what is known about the performance of Swedish students before the first TIMSS assessment and the subsequent decline in international tests.

In Chapter 4, we discuss the emergence of a systemic malaise in the Swedish school system that includes grade inflation, increasing differences in performance between boys and girls, problems of well-being, and a peculiar increase in undemocratic attitudes among students. We also discuss the deterioration of working conditions for teachers and the flight from the teaching profession. Interestingly, it has not been possible to stop this flight despite recent sizable increases in teachers’ relative wages.

In Chapter 5, we begin to approach the question of what has gone wrong and why we are seeing these problems in schools. We outline two conflicting and competing visions of knowledge: the classical view and the postmodern social constructivist view. We argue that the classical view is consistent with both modern scientific research and received

20 See Christodoulou (2014); Haeck, Lefebvre, and Merrigan (2014); Heller Sahlgren (2015b); Hirsch (2016). We return to some of these examples in the final chapter of the book.

1 INTRODUCTION: THE RISE AND PUZZLING FALL... 9 wisdom. However, as the remaining chapters show, Sweden embraced the postmodern social constructivist view.

In Chapter 6, we describe the evolution of the view of knowledge and the ensuing pedagogy within the Swedish school system. We begin in the immediate postwar years and end the chapter in the early 1990s with a discussion of the most radical national curriculum that had been enacted up to then, which consolidated the paradigm of “post-truth” schooling.

In Chapter 7, we show how this educational trend continued into the twenty-first century. We discuss the market of school choice in Sweden and describe how it interacts with postmodern social constructivist ideas. Moreover, we offer a close reading of the national curriculum that was in force at the time of writing (early 2021).

In Chapter 8, we summarize the main findings and consider the effects of “post-truth” schooling in combination with marketized education on students and teachers.

We end the book in Chapter 9 by providing some reflections on the way forward for Sweden and Western education in general.

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Chapter 2

Due to the country’s rapid development from poverty to affluence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, history came to be regarded with mistrust and suspicion in Sweden.! As the author Gunnar Ohrlander has observed about his upbringing during the optimistic and modernizing 1950s, everything old was considered to be “trash” and an unwelcome reminder of the recent hardship.?7 There was seemingly no point to history and nothing to be learned from it—a sentiment encouraged by the long-governing Social Democrats in their ambition to achieve cultural hegemony, as the historian Asa Linderborg has demonstrated.’ Instead, “progress” became the national /eitmotiv. Today, this once partly understandable view of the past as having little to offer continues to pervade attitudes toward many issues in Sweden, not least education. The general understanding of the old school system is essentially that presented in the movie Torment, set and produced in 1944, in which a cruel teacher inflicts pain on his students when they cannot recite Latin grammatical forms. The scriptwriter Ingmar Bergman, who later became a world-renowned film director, claimed to hate “school as a principle, as a system, and as an institution” and used the movie as a vehicle to express l See, e.g., Englund’s (2015) discussion of this point. 2 Ohrlander (1981, p. 20). 3 Linderborg (2001).

© The Author(s) 2022 11 M. Henrekson and J. Wennström, Dumbing Down, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-93429-3_2 his resentment of organized education.* Over the years, however, the propagandistic aims of the film were forgotten. Instead, Torment came to be seen as an accurate, almost documentary representation of school life in Sweden before the end of World War II and the start of the reforms that led the educational system down the path of “post-truth” schooling.” An iconic black-and-white screenshot from the movie in which the fictional teacher menacingly pokes a terrified adolescent with a meter-long rattan cane, is often used as an illustration of the historical teacher—-student relationship in Swedish schools—and, more or less implicitly, as an argument in favor of the postmodern social constructivist educational system. However, the now established view of the school system that directly preceded the one discussed in this book as mechanical and authoritarian is deeply misleading. During the period between roughly 1860 and 1960, Sweden instead had a (for its time) modern and sophisticated educational system, which we describe in this chapter to dispel the notion that what came before the postmodern social constructivist education paradigm was of little value or even harmful to students—undermining their innate creativity, dulling their motivation to learn, and making them susceptible to authoritarian ideologies. It should, of course, be noted that this system was not perfect. Indeed, we are keenly aware of the danger of falling into the trap of false nostalgia and golden-age thinking. Borrowing from the U.S. educationalist E.D. Hirsch’s description of the predecline era of U.S. schooling, we therefore call this period in Swedish education “the silver age.

THE PEDAGOGY OF THE OLD SCHOOL SYSTEM

The obedience-based education that is depicted in Torment was not an inherent part of the school system to which we refer. The movie’s criticism is better directed at the so-called Bell-Lancaster method, which most Swedish schools practiced when formal schooling was first enacted nationwide (in the so-called folkskola) by the Elementary School Act of 1842.7

4 See the Wikipedia entry on Bergman: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingmar_Ber gman.

5 We return to these reforms in Chapter 6. 6 Hirsch (2016, p. 6).

7 For the historical information on schooling in Sweden in this chapter, we draw mainly on Heller Sahlgren and Sanandaji (2019), Lidström (2015), and Andersson (1986).

In this rather primitive and factory-like form of education, older or more gifted students—referred to as “monitors”—transmitted what they had learned to younger or weaker students, while teachers signaled changes between subjects and exercises with whistles and bells and responded to even minor transgressions with corporal punishment.® One example of a monitor was the renowned Swedish painter Carl Larsson (1853-1919). In his posthumously published autobiography, he writes that upon entering elementary school, “I was immediately deemed so knowledgeable that I was—in accordance with the Lancaster system—elected to be a ‘monitor’ for some puppies even more ignorant than myself, and I did this so well that at the end of the semester I was awarded one daler and 24 shillings.”?

It is clear that by making it “possible for a single teacher, with the help of students who were more advanced and extreme discipline, to impart the legally required education to an excessive number of students,” the Bell-Lancaster method offered economic benefits to early-nineteenth-century Sweden.!? However, once the economy improved in the mid- 1860s, this educational model was officially abandoned in elementary schools. Direct teacher instruction for every student was introduced, and in a significant departure from the Bell-Lancaster method, teachers were then expected to explain and demonstrate what was taught rather than to have their students merely repeat information without necessarily understanding it. This change is corroborated by a vast number of written recollections submitted by former students in elementary, intermediate, and college-preparatory schools.!! Indeed, what is common to most students’ accounts of schooling is that their teachers engaged them with an authoritative and demanding yet vivid and lively approach from which the students learned knowledge and skills for a lifetime.!? This teaching

8 At least, this was how the Bell-Lancaster method was practiced in the elementary schools for mass education, which the majority of children in Sweden attended. A less strict version of the monitorial system appears to have been used in the theoretical intermediate and college-preparatory schools (Larsson, 2016).

10 Andersson (1986, p. 39). One teacher, whose recollections were recorded in print, remembered teaching 112 pupils at one time (Thedéen, 1941).

ll See Hall (1941).

12 For example, a former pupil in elementary school reported of the teacher Anders Berg that he believed that “education must strive to support development of thinking”

l4 M. HENREKSON AND J. WENNSTRÖM ideal was widely accepted and promoted in educational circles until the end of the 1950s.!3

Alongside this innovation, students were systematically sorted into classes according to ability instead of all being congregated on long benches in the same large hall. Inside the new classrooms, the students were, for the first time, placed behind separate desks with space in between, which meant that “[e]ach student came to be distinguished from the mass ... and emerge as an individual.”!* This offered students the possibility of greater self-awareness and a means of cultivating self-regulation. Hence, there was a move away from the traditional view of discipline as synonymous with the imposition of external constraints and punishments.!> Instead, a more liberal conception of discipline as emanating from within the person took root in the educational system, and considerable value was placed on the inculcation of noncognitive skills such as attentiveness, conscientiousness, honesty, reliability, and perseverance.!° (Notably, the instillment of such character strengths was ultimately fundamental to Sweden becoming a universal welfare state.!” )

These and other changes to the school system were to a large extent, although not entirely, adopted from the pedagogical principles introduced by the early nineteenth-century German philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart.!® He believed that every child had an inner potential that could be realized through intellectual self-improvement and that the key to such realization was a structured and teacher-led education focused and often said that “to read and not know is to plow and not sow” (Hall, 1941, p. 213). Another former pupil writes of his old teacher Alfred Dalin, “His instruction in history was animated and sparked interest. In particular, it gave him joy to open for us, working-class children of a simple background, the gates to the antique world of gods and heroes” (p. 248). Yet another former pupil writes of the teacher Per Mauritz Sjöstrand, “The teacher threw all his energy into teaching and was always indefatigable in his efforts to teach and explain. ... I felt both lucky and happy to be able to learn that which I did not previously know. And the teacher did not hammer knowledge into the minds of the pupils ... he taught us” (p. 259; emphasis in original).