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Unfortunate use of Swenglish in the headline. In Swedish, "friskola" means a school separate from the normal primary/secondary school funding system, run by th
by gerikson 3y ago
Unfortunate use of Swenglish in the headline.
In Swedish, "friskola" means a school separate from the normal primary/secondary school funding system, run by the kommun/council. So it can refer to a school funded by a private company, foundation, religious group etc.
Primary and secondary education in Sweden is free for the pupil or their guardians, it is payed through the tax system.
The current system, in place since a few decades, is akin to a voucher system. I.e. the funding is ultimately via the taxpayer, but through different organizations.
- hef19898 3y agoSo, it is basically a failure of non-public schools, and not a failure of "cost-free" schooling. Which makes a lot more sense. Someone should change the headline, before the discussion turns south...
- CaptainZapp 3y agoSubmitter here I didn't want to editorialize, so I used the original title. I changed "free school" to "charter school" which may make contextually more sense. I hope that's acceptable.
- dontlaugh 3y ago"Charter school" doesn't mean the same thing in different English speaking countries.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoThe English Wikipedia page for “charter school” specifically talks about friskola as an example of one. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#Sweden https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#Sweden
- dontlaugh 3y agoWikipedia is using the US meaning of the word for some reason. I'm don't think translating "firskola" to UK English as "charter school" would be correct, just like no one uses the term "charter school" to refer to institutions in the UK.
- mynameisvlad 3y agoMaybe because it’s the common definition of the world for majority of English speakers. The UK is not the end all be all of the English language. Something can be a common term everywhere else in the world. If nobody ever uses the term in the UK, then why would its definition matter or be different?
- dontlaugh 3y agoEnglish is a second language for many Europeans and we tend to use the British variant. It matters because the original title was changed to a term only popular in one country.
- mynameisvlad 3y agohttps://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/charter-school# https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/charter-... https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/charter-school https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng... There is only one definition. If someone doesn’t know the term, they can look it up. Your original comment claimed that it means different things in different countries, but that just doesn’t seem to be the case. The term seems like the appropriate English translation, even if it doesn’t exist in the UK.
- dontlaugh 3y agoOr the original translation from the article in a UK newspaper could be kept, by just keeping the original title.
- trealira 3y ago> The current system, in place since a few decades, is akin to a voucher system. I.e. the funding is ultimately via the taxpayer, but through different organizations. As an American, this sounds like exactly like a charter school system is. Or do you mean that the word is used differently outside America in other anglophone countries? From looking up the term online, it seems like it's mainly an American term.
- littlestymaar 3y ago> The current system, in place since a few decades, is akin to a voucher system. I.e. the funding is ultimately via the taxpayer, but through different organizations. Is it the system advocated by Milton Friedman or is it different?
- stringsandchars 3y ago> Is it the system advocated by Milton Friedman or is it different? I think Milton Friedman's idea, was that parents would actually receive education 'vouchers' and be free to use them in whichever education context they chose for their children. This is slightly different, as the private/public system is wholly handled by the State system: parents simply choose between alternative schools, and the state channels taxpayer's money to whichever school the child attends. Unfortunately, in many cases this has simply led to corporations or individuals who employ fewer or less qualified teachers, who in turn hand out 'optimistic' grades to the kids (attracting more parents), and extracting enormous profits from the State system. At the same time, the normal State schools are being starved of resources; standards are falling, leading to more parents putting their kids into the private schools, leading to an inevitable downward spiral.
- kristopolous 3y agoThis is basically the neoliberal story. I can't fathom for the life of me how people committed to historical concrete analysis can continue to advocate for these schemes. They always end up in exploitation. People's commitment to ideologies seem to be stronger than any material evidence.
- coryrc 3y agoThen you don't live in or near school districts failing to educate their students for decades: Detroit, Baltimore, even parts of Seattle fail to graduate young people capable of reading and writing near grade level, let alone understand even algebra. Year-after-year they fail a new class.
- jjgreen 3y agoUK English has "public schools" which are private fee-paying, so Swenglish has the edge here
- RugnirViking 3y agouk public schools are public in the sense if you have the money for tuition you can go, wheras "private" schools are only open to invited families, no matter how wealthy they are
- jjgreen 3y agono
- arethuza 3y agoUK "public schools" are pretty much a subset of private schools: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
- jjgreen 3y agoIn the UK, public & private are pretty much synonyms in the schooling context, traditionally the public schools were the "grand institutions", Eton, Harrow etc, but you'd struggle to find anyone who would make that distinction in the present day. If you did, they probably went to one of them.
- arethuza 3y agoI must admit that I'm in Scotland and my son went to a couple of private schools (though they seem to call themselves "independent" schools) - never heard anyone referring to a public school other that in UK media discussing Eton etc.
- jjgreen 3y agoI can well believe that the madness of "public school" being a private school is a peculiarly English phenomena.
- sampo 3y agoWikipedia translates the Swedish friskola as charter school in English. https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friskola https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friskola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_school#Sweden "A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autonomy for accountability, that it is freed from the rules but accountable for results."
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoThis is basically how the schooling system in the Netherlands works. Any group of people is free to found a school based on their own beliefs (religious, pedagogical, or otherwise), and such schools are quite common. The historical reason for this freedom is that Christians wanted to found religious schools, but it has since widely been used by a variety of religious and non-religious groups.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mullsork 3y agoAre those schools privately or publicly funded?
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoThey’re funded by the state.