Continued pirouettes from the Ministry of Education around IT in schools

Yesterday, after six months of waiting, my colleagues and I finally met with the Ministry of Education's State Secretaries for Schools and Higher Education, Bertil Östberg and Peter Honeth. In addition to generally highlighting the industry's skills needs, we chose to focus on two issues: urgent efforts to get more international students to Sweden and clear ambitions regarding IT as an educational tool in schools. On the first issue, we received a good response from Peter Honeth - no promises, but clearly a responsiveness to the needs of the industry.

But on the issue of IT in schools... Well, Bertil Östberg repeated the familiar arguments, which basically boil down to the fact that the government has done its bit by writing "modern technology" into the curricula and that digitization seems to be going pretty well anyway. No mention of having any kind of national strategy to ensure an equal roll-out and help municipalities develop pedagogy. And then the favorite: there are no research reports that indicate that IT helps to achieve the knowledge goals. Well-mannered as we were, we didn't ask whether there was equivalent research support for paper and pencil helping to achieve the objectives.

Perhaps saddest of all is the attitude: the unwillingness to see IT as the obvious means to achieve the goals (despite the realization that IT will be there anyway, sooner or later) and the disinterest towards the industry as a benevolent partner.

We gathered our arguments in the document An Education Policy for Promoting Digital Literacy, which we handed over at the meeting.