cannot sensibly be concerned with developing every innovation for himself, he must certainly be capable of selecting and adapting to his own circumstances the innovations developed by others. And this brings us back to the need for greater professionalisation among teachers. We shall require a very much more effective system of in-service training if educational change is to be, in the future, more than a series of ad hoc adjustments at the periphery of the system, or a series of pious plans at the centre which, even if they do happen to be taken up on a sizable scale, are often seriously garbled in the process.

SHORT MEMORANDUM BY SIXTEN MARKLUND, PH. D., KUNGL SKOLOVER STYRELSEN, STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN

THREE OBSERVATIONS CONCERNING CENTRAL RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT WORK 1. Educational research should be expanded to include development work in the school system, information and its dissemination. This will only be possible if the problems of school are related to those of the community at large. The ends and means of the school are part of the ends and means of society. A national institution for educational research ought therefore to co-operate closely with other public institutions on matters affecting the labour market, vocaional requirements, the supply of and demand for different forms of knowledge, housing policies, the health and medical services etc. Co-operation of this kind has occurred in Sweden, as has close co-operation with central trade union organizations and employers' federations.

My opinion is that a central institution of educational research may well lead to the reinforcement of single initiatives within limited sectors but that this will not be of any substantial importance unless those initiatives are co-ordinated with improvements and reforms of society.

Swedish experience has also shown quite conclusively that this work of improvement is altogether inadequate so long as it is confined to service and information. Genuine change calls for political decisions leading to democratic and administrative resolutions by the authorities concerned.

There has been considerable discussion in Sweden as to whether the central administrative body for research and development should be located within the Board of Education or outside it. The former alternative has been chosen in order to co-ordinate research with practical innovation work at local level. It is thought that the conversion of this central unit into a separate institution would be liable to isolate educational research from social development in general. Separation in itself would not enhance the competence or capacity of the unit: this requires a collective effort at political level. An institution of this kind does not improve its contribution merely by aiming at bigger and better studies. It must contribute towards the planning and implementation of what these studies show to be necessary.

This is a plan for school development in Sweden which has not merely been constructed for the purposes of theoretical discussion but has in all essentials been put into practice by central, regional and local authorities ever since 1945. 2. The second requirement for the educational system concerns the co-ordination of different forms of instruction and learning activities into a unit which is adequate from the point of view both of the psychology of learning and of school organization. Great efforts have been made in the field of educational research and development to evolve better curricula in science, reading, social science etc. Unfortunately each of these efforts has been isolated from learning and school work in general. The need now-and this is where the idea of a new national institution for research and development comes in-is above all for total solutions in which different aspects of education are co-ordinated to form an integrated whole. The curriculum development projects of the 1960s have not produced any overall solutions, hence the somewhat qualified success of this development work, taken as a whole. Further development work should aim at total solutions instead of supporting isolated projects as has been the practice hitherto. This again means that total objectives must be discussed more carefully and co-operation established between school politicians and professionals. Otherwise the establishment of a new national research institution is unlikely to accomplish more than a perpetuation of earlier, disintegrated development work.

3. The third items also concerns matters of educational co-ordination, more

particularly between pre-school, primary, secondary and tertiary education. Hitherto research and development has been founded on the premise that each of these stages is independent of the others. In future every higher stage should be planned more than hitherto according to a concerted solution and in relation to the preceding stages. This means the avoidance at all costs of exclusive requirements and specially designed lines of study where only a minority of pupils from lower schools can qualify to continue. A national institution for research and development should also provide greater opportunities for total solutions so as to make the principle of equal opportunities a practical reality.

DIFFERENTIATION AND INTEGRATION

THIRTY YEARS OF SCHOOL EXPERIMENTS

(By Sixten Marklund)

1. From Parallel Schools to the Comprehensive School

Ever since the elementary school was established, the link between lower and higher schools has been a subject of debate. Higher (grammar) schools were firmly established long before the elementary school appeared. At first the elementary schools and higher schools ran parallel to each other. Those aiming at higher studies never attended the elementary school, and those beginning in the elementary school could not claim credit for their studies there when transferring to a higher school.

As early as the 1840s, it was suggested that the elementary school might be used as a preparatory school for higher education. In 1867 it was proposed in Parliament that higher education should follow on the six-year elementary school. Since then the debate has continued up to our own times. Not until 1950, when Parliament resolved in principle that the nine-year comprehensive school was to be established, and 1962 when the structure of the new school was agreed upon, was the problem of parallel schools solved.

In 1894 it was decided that the first three classes of the elementary school were to form the basis for higher education. The parallel system was retained for classes 4, 5 and 6. The level for transfer to higher studies was raised to the fourth class of the elementary school in 1927, when the five-year junior modern secondary school was introduced. The same year, however, a double link was created between the elementary school and the junior secondary school. To the combination 4+5 was added the combination 6+4. The latter alternative was meant for children living in rural areas, who were considered to have attended elementary schools of a standard lower than that of the urban schools and who would therefore need a longer time at school to take the junior secondary school certificate.

After that came the experimental work with the nine-year comprehensive school, in which linking between the undifferentiated and differentiated departments was first of the type 6+3, but in which, after the comprehensive school was finally decided upon by Parliament in 1962, linking became of the type 8+1. From 1970 all the nine-years will be fully undifferentiated.

The parallel school system, at first completely dominant, was gradually given less scope. The number of common school years at the beginning of school has increased, and the level at which organisational differentiation begins has been raised.

LINKING BETWEEN ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

During the greater part of the nineteenth century there was no direct link between the two schools, and the attendance at a secondary school was not of fixed duration. It was not until 1894 that the secondary school was linked to the elementary school. The level of differentiation has been raised successively, and in the comprehensive school there is no streaming.

As a consequence of the general demand for longer compulsory education and the increased recruitment to voluntary education, an extensive reform of the educational system was begun in 1940, and has continued until about 1970. One is justified in speaking of a thirty-years reform. Naturally, its beginning and end are not clearly marked.

Every great change made recently in the system of education has been preceded by extensive official investigations. Some of them are given below.

The Swedish committee system is probably unique, at least as far as schools and education are concerned. In no other country with comparable cultural and economic standards reforms of education seem to have been preceded by such thorough-going preparatory work as in Sweden. The educational system and the teacher training system in Sweden are strongly centralised in comparison with those of America and some Western European countries. There are few private schools in Sweden. Schools are in the hands of the local education authorities, but the cost is met largely by State grants. No serious racial, religious or linguistic problems exist. Tests used to normalise marks are the same all over the country. Teacher training, the appointment of teachers, incomes and pensions are subject to regulations which are the same for all parts of Sweden. This should be sufficient to show that the system of education is relatively homogeneous. But the conclusion must not be drawn that education is controlled completely by the -central authorities. The curricula are drawn up in general terms, and can be varied at will. Thus instruction depends greatly on individual teachers and head

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masters. The reform years, 1940-70, may be divided into three periods, of about a decade each. Each began with an extensive official investigation, and these three investigations characterise the measure and debate during the period.

The 1940s may be called an investigation period, beginning with the 1940 Committee of Inquiry, which, in spite of the war and the general feeling of insecurity, took responsibility for several of the great problems of education.

The 1950s may be described as an experimental phase. The official investigation on which the work was based was the report made in 1948 by the 1946 School Commission on the future organisation of the Swedish school system. It was on the basis of this report that Parliament, in 1950, decided that experimental work was to be started on the new nine-year compulsory school.

The 1960s are a period of transition to the new system of education. This phase was begun with the 1957 School Committee, whose proposals in 1961 of a more definitive design for the nine-year school were accepted and confirmed by Parliament in 1962. After having the upper secondary education carefully investigated by a special committee during 1960-63, Parliament decided on a new "gymnasium" and a new type of two-year secondary school ("fackskola") in 1964. And according to another decision by Parliament in 1968 these two types of senior secondary schools will, together with a regularly two-year vocational education, form another new "comprehensive gymnasium". This school will start in 1961.

The Committee of Inquiry sat during the period 1940-47. Its report, comprising twenty printed volumes with a total of about 4,000 pages, is, in its thoroughness and penetrating treatment of facts, an admirable piece of work.

A new compulsory school, with wider tasks than the old elementary school had, can be discerned in the Committee's terms of reference, according to which, the ultimate aim of the school should be not only to communicate knowledge of young people, but also to educate them in the widest sense of the word.

Questions of organisation were dealt with in detail by the Committee in several reports, one of which treats of the relation between the elementary school and higher schools, and it is here that the Committee presents its first proposal for a new combined school.

This school was to comprise two stages of four years each: a lower, undifferentiated stage called the elementary school, and a higher, differentiated stage called the junior modern school. Thus the new school was to be a compulsory eight-year school.

The second school stage was to have streams leading to an examination, and streams without an examination. There were to be two examination streams, one the theoretical junior secondary school and the other the technical junior secondary school. These were to replace the general junior secondary school and the practical junior secondary school respectively. Parallel to these two streams, there was to be a general, but to a certain extent differentiated, stream without an examination, the practical junior secondary school. This was equivalent to the elementary school, the old continuation school, and the higher elementary school. Various differentiation alternatives were to be found in these three streams. So far as the structure of the practical junior secondary school was concerned, the Committee was prepared to give municipalities great freedom. From the very beginning of the work of the Committee of Inquiry, it was obvious that the work of investigation would be taken over by a political commission. This commission was appointed in 1946, that is to say while the Committee of Inquiry was still sitting. The 1940 Committee's report and proposals were thus of great importance as basic material for later work, which eventually led to the establishment of the present comprehensive school. The proposed eightyear school therefore never came into being.

2. Investigations and Propositions

The 1946 School Commission, the forerunner of the experimental phase during the 1950's was in some respects a direct continuation of the Committee of Inquiry. In other respects it deviated radically from the theories and evaluations of the Committee of Inquiry. Times had changed quickly, too. The Second World War had come to an end. Germany, whose schools had long been the prototype of Swedish school organisation, was completely defeated. The old European type of organisation, with a distinct boundary between the compulsory school and the academic school was no longer the obvious model in the effort to satisfy the growing demand for school attendance and education.

In Sweden the idea of a comprehensive school was by no means a new one. But it was not until the 1946 School Commission that the comprehensive school idea became accepted in the Swedish debate on education. The School Commission, like the Committee of Inquiry, found an extension of compulsory school attendance justified, but it raised the school-leaving age to sixteen years, not fifteen, thus introducing nine years' attendance. The definitive split between the two committees, however, was mainly in the differentiation model arrived at. The linking models proposed by the 1940 Committee, 4+4 (majority) and 6+2 (minority) were rejected. Instead, the School Commission proposed 8+1. The lower stage, classes 1 to 6, was to be common to all. In the seventh and eighth classes, most of the curriculum and timetable was to be common to all, but scope was to be allowed for organisational differentiation in the form of free choice of subjects. Streaming was not to begin until class 9 was reached.

The School Commission unlike the 1940 Committee of Inquiry, was a political committee. The Chairman was Tage Erlander, then Minister of Education. When he became Prime Minister in 1946, the chairmanship passed to Josef Weine, the new Minister. The School Commission consisted of representatives of the five parties in about the same proportion as the size of the parties, and a non-political member to represent the interests of parents. Many experts were attached to the School Commission, and were assigned to ten or so subcommittees to deal with special problems.

The concern of the School Commission was the schools investigated by the 1940 Committee of Inquiry, that is, the compulsory school and voluntary higher schools, as well as vocational training, adult education and problems of teacher training. In 1948 the School Commission published its first report, with proposals for guiding principles in the developing of the Swedish educational system, but it continued working for a few more years on, among other things, Schools of Education.

The School Commission criticised sharply the traditional Swedish school and its methods of work; the school was said to have inherited a burdensome legacy from the school of the Middle Ages and the school for civil servants and the like. The School Commission summarised the task of the school: welfare, study training, skill in languages and mathematics, general knowledge, aesthetic training, practical training, vocational guidance, health training, social training, and character training. To realise these aims, the character of the school would have to be altered: class instruction and the dominant question-and-answer method would have to be replaced by methods of work designed to permit more pupil activity and individual work.

Referring to the content of instruction, the School Commission proposed, that: instruction in Swedish should be increased;

English should be studied from and including the fifth class;

the so-called practical subjects should be given a stronger emphasis;

a special subject, civics, should be devoted to the systematic study of the surrounding world throughout the whole school; and

literature, history, geography, biology, physics and chemistry, as well as aesthetic subjects, should be given more scope.

This would need, the School Commission maintained, a compulsory, nine-year, state-supported municipal comprehensive school organised in three three-year stages: Lower Department, Middle Department and Upper Department. The top class, it was proposed, should be organized in three streams: one vocational preparatory stream (9y), one general stream (9a) and one stream leading to the senior secondary school (9g). This new school was to replace the elementary school, the old continuation school, the higher elementary school, municipal and state junior secondary schools (general and practical) and the girls' secondary school.

This proposed reform was presented to Parliament in 1950. In the special committee appointed to prepare this important matter there were differences of opinion which lead to a compromise which was later accepted by Parliament. According to this compromise, the new nine-year school was to replace the elementary school and the old continuation school, the higher elementary school and the general junior modern secondary school. Girls' schools and the practical junior secondary school were therefore excepted.

That the solution was a compromise was further stressed by the emphasis laid on the experimental work which was to precede and prepare the establishment of the new school. In the comments on the proposals preceding the 1950 Bill, teachers had expressed anxiety about the capacity of the new school to