There have been a number of books published in recent years that have tried to explain why Westerners have fallen behind in education compared to some Asian countries. The books have titles like The Learning Gap, The Teaching Gap and The Knowledge Deficit. Before we more closely examine the claims in these books, we must recall the ideas that shaped Swedish education over the last few decades.

In Färila in the northern Swedish province of Norrland, an experiment was carried out in the mid-1990s that illustrates the educational ideal of Swedish authorities. Here, in a primary school with a few hundred pupils, qualified teachers and no significant social problems, people wanted to test the educational model for the future based on the Swedish National Agency for Education’s plan Skol 2000 [‘School 2000’]. The school received a total of SEK 43 million extra from the Agency, from the EU Structural Fund and from Sweden’s Kno...