Free schools - a way to make the family matter more than the individual?

This is the third post discussing a trend I see in the Swedish education system, a trend to use public institutions to shield middle class Swedish citizens from foreign or native competition. In the first post I discussed the decision to charge non-EU students with tuition fees. In the second post I examined the new system of merit points, who unintentionally(?) discriminate foreign students. In this post I take a look at the primary school system, that probably never before in Swedish history has been so segregated as it is today.

If we follow the Swedish educational madness down to the earlier school years, the raison'd'etré

Merit points - a way to keep middle class schools pure?

In the last post I tried to explain the proposal to charge foreigns form outside the European Union with tuition fees. I also argued that it was unlucky, since it is unfair, and would would make Swedish universities less internationalized, in a time when they should become more.


Tuition fees for non-EU students is the wrong thing to do, but in isolation the arguments are somehow intelligible. Swedish universities do lose out one a lot of money from students who are rich enough to pay, but not smart enough to get scholarships, compared to universities in the Netherlands, the UK or elsewhere. And it is quite a problem for the vision of Europe that education costs so much in some places and is free elsewhere. Even more problmatic is that the relation between costs and high quality education is seldom straight forward.


Tuition fees, however, is just a part of a vision of education that is shared not only by the

Tuition fees - a way to keep Sweden Swedish?

I live in Sweden together with my Bulgarian girlfriend who is studying on the psychology programme in Lund, one of our dear country's most renowned sites of education. The education itself is no doubt high class, but God knows that not everyone was prepared to accept a foreign student when we came here. She, and to some extent both of us, have encountered endless obstacles and more red tape than we could ever imagine. and we have both seen a lot.

The university of Lund is well accustomed to exchange students studying master programmes, but the prospect of an individual from Bulgaria who wants to enroll in a Swedish university just like one of us was, and for many is still is, beyond comprehension. I liked to think that that the two of us are the forerunners of a true European, or even global, generation, and that university staff will eventually get used to a world where people don't necessary live in one country their entire life. Also, my own positive memories form Swedish universities made me benevolent, and a few years in more chaotic countries has induced in me a profound respect for the Swedish kind of law-abiding bureacracy.

Maybe I was naïve, but five months ago I didn't interpret these obstacles as any institutionalised racism. But the recently announces decision to ask non-EU student for tuition fees made me suspicious, and the recent schism between our minister of higher education Tobias Krantz and Högskoleverket - the Swedish university authority , made my innocence look embarrasing.


The issue at hand is that mr. Krantz has proposed a system where foreign students are accepted

Who was Bobi Tsankov

I must admit an error. Bobi Tsankov, who was killed in downtown Sofia on Tuesday, was not a journalist in the proper sense. He had published a few articles in not very renowned publications, and did some radio shows, but more than anything he is famous for being a criminal himself. He has been accused of frauds for millions, and have close ties to organized crime himself. After all, it was exactly those ties boasted that he would reveal. So the murder was maybe more of an inter-mafia showdown, than an open attack on free speech.

My mistake is completely due to not checking my sources before I write. It is elementary, I have done it before, but there is no excuse.

Unfortunately I was not the only one todo this mistake. In Bulgarian TV today, Bulgarians wonder how the international press spread eactly this point of view, without checking out who Tsankov really was. I am sure they did  not take their information from Maladets! BBC describes him as a "prominent crime journalist" Balkan Insigth use the neutral "Radio Host", while NY Times call Tsankov a "prominent radio journalist and the author of a book on Bulgaria's gangsters".

After all, poor Bobi did publish some articles, so calling him a journalist could possibly be justified, even if it is wrong. But from where did BBC and NYT learn that he was prominent?

Unfortunately, in most people'seyes, and in reports about murdered journalists, Bobi Tsankov willbe a journalist, and Bulgaria a country where journalists are killed, which is something much worse than a country where gangsters kill each other.  Sloppy writing, like this is, helps in building prejudices about a country that too few foreigners even bother to understand. I hope you can forgive Maladets!, but the BBC and NYT should be better.

The other side of the story is that a mafia murder was carried out in broad daylight in the very center of Sofia, which is bad enough.  Was Tsankov really going to reveal something, that was so sensitive? Or did someone within the organized crime want to show Borisov who really rules this country? I don't know...

Anyway, journalism should be about telling the truth, and using the label "journalist" for Bobi Tsankov is a bit too imaginative.

Slavery persists. In Africa and in Europe.

An email from the ITUC mailinglist reminded me of a horrible truth. Slavery is a phenomenon that persist, in spite of being denounced by the United Nations and forbidden in most countries in the world. According to Wikipedia, the current number of humans living in slavery is staggering 27 000 000 people. That more than the population of Romania.

The ITUC tells about domestic workers in Togo, often children, who are abused under forms that is nothing else than slavery. As always, poverty plays an important role. There is a Togolese tradition that poor families leave their kids to live with richer families that they know. The rich family feeds the kid and takes care of its education, and in exchange the kid provides domestic services.

Such a system would be oppressive in the modern world, but it belongs to a completely different context and should be assesed separately. Today , however, the same system has been distorted. Poor families leave their kids to rich families that they do not know. Often the kids are put to work the entire day, so there is no education involved. The payment, which can be as low as 8 EUR per month, are not given to the child, but transferred to its family. Since the kids are not formally employed, no labour legislation apply, and the "slave owner" is free to beat and mistreat the child as he or she wishes.

As sad as it sounds, one may not be surprised that this kind of practice is going on in a very poor country. If slavery was restricted to countries like Togo, we might hope that economic development itself would erase slavery. Unfortunately this is not the case. We might only call to mind the domestic workers in the gulf countries, whose working situation is also similar to slavery.

But slavery even exists in the midst of Europe. Balkan Insight has recently published an article, describing how criminal networks lure poor people from countries like Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Transnistriainto forced labour in the Czech Republic. There they work long hours without payment, supervised by armed guards, picking aspargus that later was served on luxury restaurants in Amsterdam and Berlin.

Slavery can exist wherever there is organized crime, and this is one reason why the fight against organized crime is also a fight for human rights. So is the fight against poverty. Because we do not want slavery anywhere. Neither in Togo, nor in the EU.