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Artist, Johan Gustaf, 1756-1820
8 (H) 14 (W) cm (sheet)
Watercolor on paper
[Image Source]
The Swedish newspaper which Lars Hedegaard edits, Dispatch International, is temporarily open for the public, without the required fee-paying access. This is to give us a glimpse of Hedegaard's work. Hedegaard is president of the Danish Free Press Society, a branch of the International Free Press Society. I have met Hedegaard twice. Once on a trip to New York to participate in IFPS activities, and another time at a lecture in Toronto.
Hedegaard was recently attacked by an "Arab looking" man. As Diana West recounts, a gunman posing as a deliveryman [it looks like a mail delivery to me] shot Hedegaard on his doorway, but missed. What kind of shooter misses at such close proximity to his target? Nonetheless, no-one is reporting that this "Arab looking" man is a Muslim assassin. Hedegaard is a vocal critic on immigration, and especially immigration of Muslims. He was convicted of hate speech in Denmark, but was acquitted. He lives under the constant threat of assassination like his fellow-Dane cartoonist Kurt Westergaard.
Dispatch International has an interesting article on one of its pages (I have reproduced the full article below, but here is the link).
Miserable Swedish skills at the universitiesInger Enkvist, the Spanish professor cited in the above article, neglects to connect the dots. It is not Swedish students who are lacking in...Swedish. As Enkvist herself says: "[T]here is also a problem in that one can be admitted to the university by studying 'Swedish as a secondary language' at high school. And even passing the mandatory language test to attend university is frequently not sufficient."
Artilce by Maria Calendar
Gloom and despair rule among the university lectures in Sweden. The language skills of the students are so bad that it is becoming hard, bordering on impossible, to conduct classes.
”Far too many of them simply do not understand what we are saying,” as nine historians of the universities of Uppsala and Linköping write in an opinion piece in the Swedish daily Uppsala Nya Tidning.
Sweden has dropped like a stone in all surveys of language skills conducted over the last 20 years. The alarms have been sounding for a long time, and the lecturers have requested effective reactions, but nothing has been done.
”The reason that we are going public with a verbal emergency call is that the students no longer have the required tool to even absorb humanist science: the language. The majority of the students coming to us from high school haves problems with the language,” the historians write.
Inger Enkvist, professor in Spanish at the University of Lund, knows the problem intimately. She has written several books and opinion pieces about it. In her latest book ”God och dålig utbildning – internationella exempel” (“Good and bad education – international examples”), as recently as last week, she again tries to make people aware of the issue.
"The problems are well-known to the lecturers, and all surveys point in the same direction. Among the skillful as well as among those having a harder time at school, Sweden stands out with declining reading skills, year after year," says Inger Enkvist to Dispatch International.
The problem has several roots, she thinks. One is the public perception of the teaching profession, which has declined so much that it no longer attracts inspired and ambitious teachers. Another is the laissez faire mentality of the 1960s and the 1970s, which provided evidence that no proficiency requirements are demanded of the pupils in primary school or in high school.
"If you merely show up, the demands are fulfilled. It is useless to discuss the quality of university education when the level of primary schools and high schools have been permitted to fall so drastically. It is not unusual that 8th grade pupils have entry-level reading skills. No single teacher can fix that at the university," says Inger Enkvist.
The attitudes of the students also leave a lot to be desired. Many exhibit what Inger Enkvist calls a “primary school mentality”, even at the university. They lie on the benches with their caps drawn down, they are insolent to the teachers, and they come and go as they please.
"It is all about rights, rights, not about the work they themselves need to do.
Effort and responsibilities. They are missing the basic insight that one cannot acquire knowledge without effort. Many students have an entirely flawed perspective."
Many students of immigrant background, young women in particular, are very ambitious and outshine their ethnic Swedish classmates in Swedish skills. But there is also a problem in that one can be admitted to the university by studying “Swedish as a secondary language” at high school. And even passing the mandatory language test to attend university is frequently not sufficient.
"The test is far below what is considered normal high school level. And the Swedish skills of the students are frequently too superficial, the language too simple, to work at university level," says Inger Enkvist.
The future looks gloomy, if one doesn’t urgently improve the Swedish primary and high schools, she thinks. Strengthen the position of the teacher and improve the image of studying, reintroduce discipline work habits and begin to making demands — these are all required actions.
Dispatch International has asked for comments from Minster for Education Jan Björklund, Liberal People’s Party, but his press secretary Eva-Marie Byberg declined the request.
Enkvist understands the problem is primarily a problem of poor Swedish comprehension from non-Swedish speaking students who haves somehow managed to infiltrate the university. But she throws into the basket: lazy (Swedish) students, insufficiently prepared (Swedish) high school students, unskilled (Swedish) teachers, the (Swedish) laissez faire mentality of the 1960s and 1970s. The blame falls squarely on the Swedish students. I.e. the native-born, white, non-immigrant Swedish. The ambitious immigrants, and especially those ambitious women immigrants, cannot be at fault and cannot be criticized.
I wrote above that Enkvist neglects to connect the dots. More precisely, Enkvist doesn't, cannot, connect the dots. To do so would be to declare that non-Swedish students perform worse than their Swedish counterparts. And that would be racist. And to add to this egalitarian mix (egalitarian for non-Swedes), Enkvist emphatically adds those ambitious immigrant young women (but which ones, and where?).
The university has a long and rich history. According to this site:
In 2007 the Museum Gustavianum celebrated its 10th anniversary. The Gustavianum building is much older. Some sections are from the Middle Ages. It is Uppsala University's oldest preserved building erected in large parts during the 1620s.
The name comes from Gustav II Adolf who donated funds and land for a new university building. Previously, the University was run in a house from
the Middle Ages south west of the Cathedral.
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[Image Source: Dispatch International]
At some point, Westerners are going to have to realize that their countries are being hijacked as they watch, and that so-called representatives like Enkvist are giving them away without a struggle. At some point, Western dignity will have to be resotred.
