Social levelling

If you follow the debate in Norwegian media about schools, you will frequently come across the term "sosial utjevning". The term, which can be roughly translated as "social levelling", digs straight into the strong egalitarian attitudes in Norway.

This term has got two sides to it. On the one side, we want to pull up the pupils and children that are struggling at school, and that have trouble learning important skills like reading, writing and arithmatics. This is of course right. To help struggling children to learn is an obligation we have as an inclusive society, and we need to try as hard as we can to help children that for some reason or other have problems learning. We need to do everything we can to help them acquire the skills needed to be successful in their lives. This goes for social skills, "hard skills" like reading, writing, calculus, and for instilling in them an understanding of what it entails to be part of a society.

But the term has also got an ugly back side, and it is this back side that I always react to whenever I come across this term. When you are levelling something out you are mending the dumps and holes, but you are also removing the bumps sticking up. Transferred onto the school system, this means that you pull up the struggling pupils, but you also pull some down, trying to make an average out of every pupil.

The idea behind this social levelling is to give every child the same opportunities to learn, indepentent of his or her parents' standing or financial resources. On the face of it, that is noble enough. But when this levelling is done by pulling some down, that is in my opinion inherently wrong. From my brief experience as a teacher, I know how many resources go to children with learning problems, and how much academically gifted children tend to be much more left on their own without much extra stimulus or extra challenges. As long as they master the curriculum, we are satisfied with that, and do not encourage them to reach further.

To be perfectly clear, I do not mean that we should stop making an effort to help children that struggle. But we also need to make an effort to help the children that display a gift for the traditional school curriculum to strive further. We should not try and level the children out and try to make them all equal by pulling some up and some down, but borrow the slogan of the American military and encourage every child to strive to be all that they can be.

Skills and aimless university students...

On my way to work today, listening to the radio in my car, I got to think of something that I have noticed while living here in the UK. Whenever there's talk of education and training, it is very much focused on acquiring skills. Using this word in the way it is used here, it seems that it is a strong emphasis on acquiring very palpable, tangible skills that can immediately be put into use in a work situation.

Maybe it is just me, coming from the more academic end of education in Norway, but it seems we do not have that strong an emphasis on actually getting palpable skills that we can use in a work situation. Going to the university in Norway, this aspect of education was very far back in the minds of myself and most of my study buddies. Hearing all the talk of skills here now, I kind of feel that I should have been much more aware of that during my study years. Wandering about in the corporate world, I do not feel that my skills are particularly marketable.

Norway's got some very good financing schemes for education, and anyone that wants to can have any education they want - given that they fulfill the enrollment criteria. This easy access to getting the education you want leads many students to take into account their own interests more than what would be sure to lead to a job later. According to some numbers I read a while ago, Norway's got more than 200.000 students in higher education at any time. That is a pretty high number for such a small country.

There is of course nothing wrong with going into an education that interests you. There is much to be said in defense of that. But there is a limit to how many historians, sociologists and creative artists we can use. I think that if more young students really thought through their choice of education, we would have seen a change in what they do study. A lot of them would have chosen another type of education than going to the university altogether. Many of the students hanging around at the universities are there either because their buddies are there or because they really don't know what which education they want to get. Instead of wandering aimlessly around the university in search of some interesting lectures, it might have been better for many of those to choose an education that would get them some hard skills that could be put into use in actual work.

For myself, it's not so much that I regret going to the university as such. On the whole, I think that was the right choice for me. But if I would have started over and done it again, I would have kept much more focus on making my degree more marketable by choosing more carefully the subjects of which it is made up.

Being an expat with a student loan

Norway is a rich country. We got it good. Compared to people from many other countries, most Norwegians are fairly well off. Some would even say loaded. We have a high living standard and the wages we earn must be among the highest in the world. Naturally, those high wages also drive the prices up, causing the costs of living to be among the highest in the world as well.

When I decided to leave my cozy, protected life in Norway just over a year ago, I guess I did it at least partly because I wanted to experience something different. One thing is for sure - I did not do it because I thought I was going to earn more money than I did. Having ventured into the ruthless world of cut-throat capitalism without any obviously marketable skills, I now feel the effects of that particular choice.

Every three months, I get a nasty message in my online banking site inbox; "Your quarterly payment is now due." An ugly lump of hard-earned money must leave my rapidly diminishing bank account. That really hurts. Living in Norway, I didn't really notice those payments to the degree I now do, as my salary was almost double my current one. And also, living up north, I had a sizable write-off that the Government gives as an incentive for people to settle up there. So the proportion of my salary I now pay is several times higher. Not good.

I guess we are very lucky in the sense that everyone in Norway has got the opportunity to get an education, no matter the economic situation of our parents. But considering the size of the student loan that we have to amass to get that education, in a sense it kind of limits our choices when it comes to work later on. We have to find a reasonably well paid job to be able to pay off the student loan.

The future of the Norwegian school..

After the resignation of the former Minister of Knowledge, Øystein Djupedal, his fellow party member, Bård Vegard Solhjell, has become the new wise man of education and knowledge in Norway. New minister, new policies - one of mr. Solhjell`s policies is to make the Norwegian primary and secondary school less theoretical.

The criticism from the Right is that SV (the Socialist Left Pary) and the rest of the Left is hysterically afraid of differences in the school. They want to make everything the same for everybody, not offering the more theory-hungry pupils what they want.

I agree in the criticism of the Right Party, but at the same time I realise that it is immensely hard for a lot of schools to offer adapted programs for all students. From my own experience as a teacher, I know that students are very different. And I know that it is really hard, to make the classes suit everybody`s learning style. And it is certainly true, as SV claims (and it is something that a lot of pupils, teachers, parents, politicians, and other realise, too), that a lot of students find a lot of theory boring.

At the same time, there are some students that find theory interesting and stimulating. These pupils should have the possibility of delving into theoretic subjects. In my opinion, these students should be viewed and appreciated as an asset for Norway. Of course we need the children that will go on to become construction workers, truck drivers, hairdressers, bakers, and plumbers. But we also need the more theoretically gifted pupils, and should nurture their talents. To do otherwise would be a grave mistake.