Education shall be designed in accordance with fundamental democratic values and human rights, such as the sanctity of human life, individual freedom and integrity, the equal value of all people, gender equality, and solidarity between people. Everyone involved in education shall promote human rights and actively combat all forms of abusive treatment.
The training shall be based on scientific principles and proven experience.
Education Act § 5
The foundations of education
Scientific basis
Science is always systematic and, in a sense, public.
Belief, superstition, and conjecture differ from science in that they lack systematicity and public critical scrutiny. Science, or the sciences, can thus be said to be systems of proven methods for investigating, understanding, and explaining reality as accurately as possible and according to all the rules of the art. Science does not fix knowledge about the world, but creates new knowledge in new paradigms. In science, conclusions are drawn based on observations, or on previous conclusions that are also based on observations.
Sometimes a hypothesis is also put forward, which involves an attempt to generalise the result or find a cause for it. The hypothesis, or consequences of the hypothesis, can be further verified or falsified with the help of additional systematic and documented observations. This can be done through quantification, i.e., seeing if enough observations agree so that a "truth" can be generalized.
Another way of expressing this is that quantitative science claims that this is true and it is true everywhere, whereas qualitative science says that this is interesting and I want to know more, even if it is only about this particular case.
Finally, it can be said that systematic quality work in preschool activities based on pedagogical documentation can be considered to have a scientific basis.
Proven experience
Testing an experience is a collective action. The experience can be tested against other experiences and practices or against theory and science. Ideally, both.
To test differs from to try in that the prefix be moves the testing from the past tense to the present tense; the testing continues, so to speak. Bepröva is an unfinished process in which both the testing and the experience are changing. Thinking of the testing process as something like this means that neither the timeline nor the tree metaphors work; you have to replace them with rhizomes, in which the tested and untested experiences intertwine.
Democracy
The goal of education can be to teach about democracy or to be democratic. The question that applies to education is: Democracy as a theory of popular rule or democracy as a skill?
In order to raise children to be democrats, training and practice in democratic skills are the only viable options. To become democratic adult citizens, children must be citizens in a democratic context. Education must take place through democracy and be organized democratically. People who are part of a democracy integrate with other people and, through this integration, become their own subjects. It is through the differences between others that one's own self becomes unique.
In democracy, the subject is sought after—who is the individual—rather than what the individual is, the object. It is the pluralism of unique "who"s that creates the context we call democracy. Being a "who" presupposes that others are also "who"s; the subject can only exist surrounded by other subjects. If someone is objectified, then everyone else in the context also becomes an object.
The question posed by democracy is not what a human being is, but who a human being is. But as we explore who "who" is, we discover that it constantly changes shape as it integrates with the context. The ultimate question is therefore not who "who" is, but instead who "who" becomes.
Text: Sölve Lagercrantz, preschool director in Botkyrka
- Late Latin paradiʹgma, from Greek paraʹdeigma ‘model’, ‘example’, ‘pattern’, from para- and deiʹgma ‘pointing out’, ‘proof’, after Thomas Kuhn’s term for the pattern that governs scientific thinking. Kuhn argues that, just as linguistic inflection patterns, e.g. amo, amas, amat, show how to inflect other verbs, sciences are based on specific models. A paradigm must be attractive enough to attract practitioners and at the same time open enough to present interesting problems.
- A falsification of a hypothesis means that an observation, or another verified hypothesis, contradicts the hypothesis. A falsification thus means that an observation or another verified hypothesis verifies the negation of the hypothesis.
