Second, they contested the claim that Swedish schools had become worse over the last few decades. International and national surveys calling attention to the decline in knowledge, they argued, had to be weighed against surveys that showed the opposite, which in their not quite crystal-clear logic would mean that (Minister for Education) Jan Björklund’s views on school issues were built on sand. In particular, they made it a point in the debate that Björklund himself had not trained as a teacher so he did not know what he was talking about.

 

This way of thinking seems strikingly familiar from a number of other disciplines. 
Anyone who chooses to study criminology – another subject at university that, like teacher training studies, has experienced explosive growth since the 1970s – will learn that people in society have essentially misunderstood two things. First, there is a perception that crime sometimes increases and sometimes becomes more brutal, and second, many people think that tougher prison sentences and more police officers lead to a decrease in crime. But it is extremely difficult to establish such developmental trends and causal relations with certainty – at least with hundred per cent certainty.

 

A third example can be taken from linguistics, where there is a similar discrepancy between how the average person sees reality and how research describes our present-day situation. It can also be noted here that anyone beginning university studies in this subject will soon feel compelled to revise their views on at least two phenomena. It is argued that there are no qualitative leaps in language either, such as improvements or deteriorations; there are only changes.

 

Anyone who deplores, for instance, the increasing Anglicisation of Swedish and who believes that stricter rules will help come to grips with spoken features and slang in written language will learn that language is kept alive by the trickling of spoken expressions into written language. In this subject too, we thus also learn that the situation cannot be improved by measures in the form of stricter rules and that there are never any real deteriorations.

 

One can naturally choose to interpret this as a sign that everything is in fact simply getting better and better in the fields of language, crime and education, at least since the 1970s, when these kinds of explanatory models really caught on. But one can also interpret the tendency to never acknowledge any deterioration as a consequence of our living in an egalitarian era when nothing is considered better than anything else.

 

In a world where no one kind of knowledge is considered more valuable than any other, it is obviously possible to say that the level of knowledge among pupils in elementary school has remained constant or is continually increasing. In the final analysis, it is a question of what one chooses to define as knowledge.

 

If the use of a mobile telephone is classified as a fruit of knowledge that is just as important as solving differential equations, then naturally it is difficult to ever talk about deteriorations or improvements. And in a world where no expression of language is considered more correct than any other, then it is of course just as impossible to claim that we are headed in the direction of growing linguistic impoverishment. 

 

At the same time, people should not let themselves be fooled by the putative tolerance that is considered characteristic of this kind of fatalism and cultural relativism. Because under the surface, these kinds of attitudes often end up in the hierarchical view that the state prevailing at that moment is always the best and should never be opposed or resisted, especially not with the argument that we have nothing to learn from the past. People need not look too far back in history or look too far out into the world to realise what is unconstructive about this kind of attitude.

 

For the left, this means the kind of multicultural relativism presented as an ideal of having various distinct and purportedly homogeneous cultures within the same country. In contrast to this is right-wing populism, which is based on essentially the same ideal, albeit with the difference that in this case people want to preserve the distinct and purportedly homogeneous cultures within each country’s borders.

 

However, in this issue of Axess, I would like to argue that all the articles in the “Frizon,” “Intervju” and “Tema” sections stand in opposition to this kind of relativism which, to stretch it, maintains that every cultural expression and cultural form is equally valuable and that there is no reason to prefer, for instance, Western legal customs today to sharia laws. In particular, the theme texts consider the problem of how to find a practical solution without winding up in the rigid positions of the right or left.