In the proposal for a new teacher education presented in government report SOU 2024:81, it is proposed that the history of the school system is based on the teacher education. We who have historical knowledge know that material congestion is a recurring problem in teacher education. However, this is a remarkable proposition for several reasons.
First, it violates the recurrent emphasis of the governing parties on the need for Bildung. In our complex society, we need knowledge beyond the strictly instrumental, which helps us develop as individuals, and gives us an understanding of our culture and what it means to be human. You cannot enthusiastically support such efforts, and at the same time eradicate the historical element of teacher education.
Secondly, the proposal prevents teachers from being given an understanding of their workplace. The school is governed not only by its governing documents, but also by its history. In part, this is a matter of the school's inertia: the school is shaped by its traditions, and as all school reforms have shown, there is much that is difficult to change. In order to develop the school, all teachers need an understanding of the power of tradition, and how it affects their work. Against this background, formulating a regulation that focuses entirely on current curricula, course plans and subject plans is incomprehensible.
Teachers also need insight into how the school system has developed. Our school system is the result of a historical development without which neither independent schools, the pre-school class and its abolition, nor the recurring grading reforms are possible to understand. Historical perspectives help teachers to critically relate to contemporary trends in order to assess their possible consequences and effectiveness. This is a central part of what it means to be a professional teacher. Against this background, it is ironic that the report that proposes that educational historical perspectives should be removed from teacher education, nevertheless itself recognizes the necessity of historical perspectives by using them to understand school development.
In conclusion, it is striking that a report that emphasizes the importance of memory for learning and development suggests that the history of the school system should be cut from teacher training. Knowing that the ability to remember is critical to storing and using our experience, how can this report deny future generations of teachers the opportunity to use our collective memory of schooling? The history of education offers an extremely significant collection of knowledge about school reforms, teaching practices and experiences. History teaches us both about what worked better, and what worked worse. As the saying goes: learning from history is learning for the future.
In that respect, the investigative work could also have been strengthened by an elaborate historical perspective. We know that teacher education reforms take place with a certain regularity, follow certain historical trends, and that they all deal with dilemmas regarding the length, breadth and professional affiliation of the education in different ways. If you don't have a nuanced understanding of how these issues were handled in previous reforms, the risk is imminent that you repeat the mistakes that were made in the past in different ways. If you don't know where you came from, it's hard to know where you're going.