A portrait painting of Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, by Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, 1793. Wikicommons/Museum of Fine Arts of Lyon. Public domain.When it comes to education, the public debate in France, as in Germany, seems to have taken a very cartoonish shape. It’s reached the point where we can predict almost exactly how the debate will go. The discussion will start with someone from the left wing highlighting Sweden as being the model to follow. A country which supposedly achieved high results while giving more room to creativity, imagination and free-time. The debate will unavoidably end with some right-winger replying that Sweden has a very high suicide rate, that the Swedish are not really happy in general – even slightly neurotic – and that this so-called model would damage the French “art de vivre”. On top of that, the new Swedish generation is said to be ill-mannered.
The problem I have with this debate is simply that all of the above is wrong. Firstly, Sweden's performance in terms of education, as measured by the PISA test, is very low. As an example, the country only ranked 27th in science, behind.... France. Secondly, the suicide rate in Sweden is absolutely not as high as claimed. With a suicide rate of 12 in every100,000, the country is about the European norm, even better, their rate is lower than France’s. Thirdly, when it comes to ill-mannered kids, anybody who has been to France recently knows that Frenchman really have no right to say anything about this.
In other words, in 10 years, and despite everything that has been written and said on the matter, nobody has taken 5 minutes to check the facts on Google....
