What happened
Students training to become subject teachers in religion and history at Malmö universitet are protesting that they only receive just over one lecture a week. During a ten-week course, the students have had three full weeks completely without teacher-led time, and the trade union Sveriges lärarstudenter has now launched a national petition for more teaching hours. The background to the reduced teaching time is the state productivity deduction, which since the 1990s has annually cut funding to universities and higher education institutions. According to the trade union SULF, the cuts mean that a third of today's students are in practice taught without state funding.
Our analysis
Every week, politicians step up to the podium and demand tougher measures in classrooms. They speak of "Swedish values", lacking integration, and how schools are to resolve all of society's fractures. But when the same politicians are to fund the education of the teachers who will address faith, history, and source criticism, they send the students home to solitary self-study.
It is not in affluent residential neighborhoods that the consequences of eroded teacher education hit first. It is in classrooms where pupils need teachers with deep subject knowledge and the confidence to confront prejudice and racism. When future religion and history teachers barely get to meet their professors, it is the students with the least support from home who pay the price.
Those in power can afford to talk about integration around the clock. But when push comes to shove, school is treated as an expense to be cut, not a societal foundation to be built.
Explained
The productivity deduction is a state austerity requirement introduced in the 1990s, meaning that government agencies and universities each year receive an automatic deduction of 1–2 percent of their wage appropriations to force efficiency.