Is not the expression ”school of knowledge” comparable to words like head cap or foot shoe? Well, if you acquaint yourself with some of the recent findings continually being churned out by the pedagogical departments at the universities, such a linguistic puritanism is easily put to shame. For then it becomes obvious that our elementary and secondary schools do not necessarily have anything to do with ”knowledge”. At least not for those in Sweden who have been assigned the task of instructing teachers and principals.

One example is the professor in pedagogy at Örebro university, Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta, who objects to the fact that teachers giving marks in a subject such as Swedish primarily attach importance to ”the ability of pupils to read and write” and that the teachers have ”emphasized grammar and that the pupils are able to account for our literary canon”. She further thinks that the school ought to pay more attention to how ”young people (…) express themselves by telephone, text messages, Facebook and international internet games such as World of Warcraft”.

Bagga-Gupta exemplifies with ”an 18-year-old who was considered to do badly in Swedish. That this was correct we could also see from his texts. But when we followed him in his spare time, and saw how he communicated through text messages, on the Internet and how he wrote angry e-mails to his girlfriend, a different picture emerged. He was much more capable than the pedagogical methods of the school are able to capture”.

When I meet with older relatives, for whom it was far from self-evident that they should continue studying after elementary school, I reflect that they were lucky not to encounter pedagogues like Sangeeta Bagga-Gupta. Or teachers who think that the knowledge of a farmer’s son or daughter about hay-making or milking is equal in worth to the professor’s children’s knowledge of algebra and German. According to the logic of contemporary pedagogues, buckets and rakes would have been thought an appropriate part of the education for the former, while the latter, on the contrary, would had been supplied with slide rules and dictionaries.

When you realise that traditional gathering of knowledge is actually correctly perceived as a skill with which to create a distinctive profile as compared to other schools, you also realise that every claim that we are living in a ”knowledge society” must be modified somewhat.

However, the idea that we live in a knowledge society is problematic also from another viewpoint. In view of the fact that politics in recent years has become populated more than ever by twittering PR-people with degrees, at best, from some American sham university, Bagga-Gupta might after all not be completely unrealistic in thinking that in the future, language education might be limited to texting, updating Facebook and writing angry love e-mails.

Anyone reading, in this issue of Axess, the interview by Mats Wiklund with Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes, can hardly help being struck by the differences between the situation today and that of a hundred years ago, with regard to the relation between classical education, cultural schooling, and influence on society. Even if the Bloomsbury Group is a rewarding target for jokes, as the quintessential goose liver-left, and even if a revision of the economic theories of Keynes should prove necessary, it is impossible to neglect the momentous impact of this group on the development of Western society during the 20th century – when you think of art and literature, but of course also politics and culture in a wide sense.

This is an influence which grew out of a rare combination of individual talent, traditional British education with its passion for classical education, and – of course – a very creative mix of people, with similar frames of reference but at the same time completely dissimilar in knowledge, tempers, and life experiences.

That many in the Bloomsbury Group would come to question the cultural tradition that was the very condition of their success as individual thinkers and artists, is an ironic twist – which should not, however, make us go as far as holding them responsible for the foolhardy slogan that Carin Jämtin put forward in connection with the elections this year: ”In school, there should be orderliness and rules. And lots of pupils who are taught to challenge rules.” Carin Jämtin does not seem to understand that the truly radical challenges to rules is something that is not learnt as such. On the contrary, they are an immediate consequence of thorough knowledge – as well as the very foundation of scientific progress. This was known in the 19th century no less than today.