Viking Economics (17 page)

UNICEF did a study of childhood well-being in which data were presented on career aspirations among fifteen-year-olds. Middle-class professionals generally assume that climbing the class ladder—“getting ahead”—should be the aspiration of all, since, for them, higher class position implies superiority.

As a sociologist, I find this assumption of superiority common among all groups that hold higher places in socially constructed vertical hierarchies. Examples are white people, men, heterosexuals, and members of a dominant religious affiliation. Lower-ranked personnel entering large organizations find it advantageous to conform to the expectations of their “betters,” as when children of the working class, for example, mimic middle-class behavior to get preferred jobs.

Career aspirations of fifteen-year-olds, therefore, offer an interesting picture of just how classist any society is. Do the young people necessarily want what their teachers want for them? Wilkinson and Pickett took the cross-national UNICEF data and matched it with data on inequality in rich countries. They found that in the more equal countries more young people aspired to working-class jobs, while in countries with greater inequality more young people aspired to professional and even upper-class jobs.
¹¹⁸

As we might expect, the “usual suspects” were on each end of that polarity, with more Nordic youngsters aspiring to working-class jobs while the highly unequal Portuguese and American
youngsters were on the other. For a change, the UK was higher than the Nordics in percentage of fifteen-year-olds aspiring to low-skilled work, suggesting some retention of the robust British working-class culture of the early twentieth century.

As a Philadelphian, I am familiar with the youngster shooting hoops in a high-poverty neighborhood playground, who will be lucky to get any job at all, telling me that when he grows up he will be a star on a professional basketball team. I practice-taught in the third grade of such a neighborhood. One of our forty-four youngsters told me he planned to become a nuclear physicist.

One more cruelty visited upon young people in high-inequality countries is to induce star-struck dreams but to refuse to fund pathways to achieving satisfying outcomes, including high-wage working-class jobs.

The sixteen-year-old graduates from
ungdomskolen
are finished with compulsory schooling. Those who are eager to get a job can take short vocational courses for free and look for a job. Another option is to become apprentices, a formal program in which they work for a wage and receive instruction at the same time.

As in Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, most Norwegian sixteen-year-olds decide to go on to the three-year
videregående skole
(upper secondary school), which gives them many more options for a career. They choose between academic studies or vocational studies. Within each choice are multiple paths with choices of electives.

The youngsters often choose music as an elective even while taking their regular music class. When I lived in Norway I taught music in both lower and upper secondary school, so I taught the whole age range of thirteen to nineteen. On my first day with the nineteen-year-olds, several young men came up to me after class. They explained that they wouldn’t be able to sing because they were tone-deaf.

Astonished, I laughed out loud. I couldn’t hold back my spontaneous, although rude, reaction. In English, I asked, rhetorically, “Do you speak Norwegian?”

They waited to see what was next.

“You can’t speak
Norwegian
if you’re tone deaf!” I said with a grin. I said it again in Norwegian, exaggerating the melody in the sentence.

They laughed, and nodded sheepishly. They knew as well as I that the intonation in their language is so rich that it is almost like singing. The young men went on to enjoy our music classes. They didn’t, however, join the school chorus I was starting.

Since my time there (1959–1960), Norwegians have expanded the role of music in schools. In elementary and lower secondary schools all students sing, dance, compose, and listen to music on a regular basis. They also have the chance to take instrumental or voice lessons at the local music or cultural arts school. (Every municipality must have, by law, a music or culture school.) Their lessons might be after school or during school hours as an elective.
¹¹⁹
One student in five takes advantage of this free opportunity.

Students in the upper secondary school—ages sixteen to nineteen—no longer have regular music classes, but they can still choose music as a major elective.

While visiting Norway in 2011, I encountered pop-up band
concerts in a variety of public spaces, including just outside the Oslo central railroad station. I talked with several of the band directors, each of whom told me the same thing: there has been a proliferation of bands in Norway—youth bands, community bands, and so on. They didn’t find it remarkable. I guess it’s not, considering the schools’ intention to free as many Norwegians as possible to enjoy making music.

World Bank statistics show Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom in the mid–90 percent rates for secondary-school enrollment, with the United States coming in at 89.5 percent. Norway currently has the lowest high school dropout rate among OECD countries (4.6 percent).

Norway and Sweden have a low student-teacher ratio (about 1 to 10) while the UK and the United States come in higher, at about 1 to 14. It’s another Nordic move that supports freedom: smaller classes give more space for students’ diverse learning styles.

The vocational-studies track of upper secondary school has high standards; some courses have higher minimum entrance requirements than those for the academic-studies track. The main goal of the vocational track, called Vocational Educational Training (VET), is to prepare the nineteen-year-old graduate for a good job in one of nine fields, and also to prepare the graduate to go on to a Vocational Technical College for more advanced training if desired. It includes a very strong apprenticeship dimension, to build in learning-by-doing.

However, the school builds in a plan B, to enhance the freedom of the student. Educators designed the curriculum to enable graduates, if at that point they have become interested, to choose to enter university with only one year of additional preparation.

The other track in upper secondary school is academic, explicitly
preparing the students to go on to a university or another post-secondary-school program like nursing or teaching. Graduates of this track, however, can still decide that thirteen years of schooling is enough and that they’re ready to enter the labor market.

When the students near graduation, they call themselves “russ,” and celebrate noisily around the town. As a teacher I was awakened one morning by a flatbed truck full of loud, excited nineteen-year-olds outside our apartment. It was early. The students wouldn’t leave until I threw a coat over my pajamas and joined them on the truck, which transported them hooting and cheering to a breakfast in honor of us teachers.

In 1992, the Swedish parliament, attracted to the idea of offering school choice, allowed for-profit secondary schools to be set up that would receive public money based on size of enrollment. One of the differences from charter schools in the United States is that, in Sweden, the teachers are members of the educators’ union. Regional economic differences affect how much money a municipality can pay per student. By 2013, a quarter of Swedish students had enrolled and large corporations had set up chains of schools, finding them to be cash cows.

After two decades of experience, Swedes are turning against this model. Because the free-market model pits school against school, teachers feel pressured to give higher grades to attract more students. Some corporations were hiring underqualified teachers
and stinting on library and other services in order to turn a larger profit. One of the chains, JB Education, owned by the Danish private equity firm Axcel, went bankrupt in 2013, leaving students stranded and about 1,000 people jobless.

The head of the largest teachers’ union noted that the national education department had lost track of quality control. Another problem is that many of the best students flocked to the brandname private schools, which lowered the quality of the schools they left behind. Overall, secondary-school achievement has declined in Sweden, according to the OECD PISA scores. One interpretation of the experiment is that enhanced freedom for corporations resulted in diminished freedom for the students themselves as they prepare for life.

The Swedish Green Party, which originally voted for the school reform, issued a public apology in 2013: “Forgive us, our policy led our schools astray.” A 2013 poll showed that 58 percent of Swedes are now opposed to introducing the profit motive into publicly funded education.
¹²⁰

Adolescence being what it is—in Norway as elsewhere—there are young people who drift quite a bit before finding their motivation. If they quit school at sixteen, and discover after a couple of years that they do want to continue to
videregående skolen
(upper secondary school), it is their right to enter as late as age nineteen.

Alternatively, they can take advantage of the free follow-up career and training services provided to anyone of age fifteen to twenty-one
who needs them and isn’t working or in school already. One path (called “occupational rehabilitation”) consists of up to three years of vocational training within the public educational system.

On graduation from
videregående skolen
, many nineteen-year-olds go to college, but an alternative is to attend a post-secondary vocational school, which offers a course of study from half a year to two years. Post-secondary vocational education gets high respect not only for its economic role but also for encouraging participation in society. In fact, the rates of civic and political participation for graduates of vocational post-secondary education are higher than for graduates of colleges.

Nordland Vocational College of Art and Film is an example of post-secondary vocational education. It’s located in the traditional island fishing town of Lofoten in the far north of Norway. Its two-year courses offer a choice: film or visual art. The school says that many of its grads go on to institutions of higher education such as a university, while others go directly to work in film production or the arts. The school is public, owned by the county council, and free of tuition charge.
¹²¹

To enter vocational colleges, students may not need to have graduated from upper secondary school, if they can show equivalent competence derived from work and informal learning experiences.

Still another dimension of freedom is the minimum of difficulty that Norwegians have in transferring from one kind of school to another: the universities (Norway has seven), the university colleges, and the specialized institutions at the university level (economics, music, sport sciences, veterinary science, architecture and design, and theology). Norway also has private higher-education institutions that charge tuition.

Norway gives its secondary public schools an additional mission: adult education and continuing education for lifelong learning. Nongovernmental organizations also get into the act, with substantial taxpayer support offering free adult education. To free more adults to study, these programs often come with gratis childcare.

The legacy of lifelong learning, however, long precedes today’s secondary public schools. In 1864 a pair of teachers launched Norway’s first folk high school, in the Eastern Norway town of Sagatun. They were inspired by the Danish visionary poet and writer N.F.S. Grundtvik, the bishop who inspired the Danes to renew themselves after Prussian chancellor Otto von Bismarck annexed a third of their country.

The folk high school movement pioneered popular education, creating boarding schools where both younger and older adults could learn informally, away from academic elitism, in an atmosphere of mutual respect and near-reverence for “the folk.” In 2012, there were still seventy-seven folk high schools where students could take short courses up to a year, supported by public funding.

The education component dovetails with the larger economic model that enables Norway to adjust constantly to the changes of globalization, which includes so-called sunrise and sunset economic activities. Many Norwegians expect that during their working lives they will switch careers, learn new skill-sets, or both.

The economy as a whole benefits from an expectation of career flexibility: square pegs in round holes are not optimally productive. The universal health-care system, income support for people
who are laid off, and an abundance of free educational opportunities encourage people to reinvent themselves.
¹²²

Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason has warned about a dynamic he observes in many countries that discover an extraordinary natural resource. Ironically, he finds such nations typically “develop a false sense of security and become negligent about the accumulation of human capital. Indeed, resource-rich nations can live well from their natural resources over extended periods, even with poor economic policies and a weak commitment to education.” Applying his hypothesis to Norway, he observes that oil has distorted part of its economy but has not weakened the Norwegian commitment to education. On the contrary, he notes: “The proportion of each cohort attending colleges and universities in Norway rose from 26 percent in 1980 to 62 percent in 1997.”
¹²³

The Swedes experience the education ladder in a similar way to the Norwegians, starting at age six, holding off on grades through primary school, going on to lower secondary school and being allowed to leave at about age sixteen. Swedish fifteen-year-olds test right in the median average of the OECD scores. If they continue school, they, like Norwegians, get to choose between the academic and the vocational tracks; also like the Norwegians and Danes, about half of the Swedish students choose the vocational track.