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Education in apost‐comprehensive ERASixten Marklund aa University of StockholmPublished online: 21 Jun 2010.

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BRITISH JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL STUDIESVol. XXIX, No. 3 October 1981

EDUCATION IN APOST-COMPREHENSIVE ERA

SixTEN MARKLUND, University of Stockholm

The words 'post-comprehensive era' imply that there is or has beena 'comprehensive era in education'. Perhaps we should instead sayan 'era of comprehensivization'. This is simply the post-war period,

the last 35 years, during which the principle of comprehensive educationhas been thoroughly discussed. Comprehensive schools have also beenintroduced in some countries on a full national scale. . ,

Today we can observe certain signals which indicate that the era ofcomprehensivization is changing or even coming to an end. Comprehensi-vization is no longer the focus of interest. We are approaching somethingnew, partly unknown and unpredicted. And this is what I want to discusshere. Sweden was the first Western European country to implement thecomprehensive system on a full national scale. It is therefore not surpris-ing that this country should also be facing the problems of a post-comprehensive era before many others. ' . .

It took Sweden almost thirty years to complete the comprehensivizationof its school system. The external and organizational change was plannedand executed with an almost mechanical efficiency. Practically nothingnow remains of the previous school structure. It certainly was a compli-cated affair with many hard battles, both political and educational.

The precomprehensive era had a system of what we called 'parallelschools'. Besides the compulsory school ('folkskola') there were a numberof secondary schools: on the lower-secondary level there were fifteendifferent types of public schools. The 'folkskola' extended its length, andthe secondary school its breadth. Just as in England, this system wasinvestigated by a governmental ad hoc committee. England did it throughthe Spens Committee with its Spens Report,- followed by the EducationAct of 1944. We had first a big expert committee from 1940, which wasfollowed in 1946 by a political commission. Both were chaired by theMinister of Education. The commission proposed a new nine-yearcomprehensive compulsory school with no streaming until the final year,to replace the existing system of primary and lower secondary schools.

The Swedish parliament followed most of the proposals made by thecommission. Many observers saw the delayed differentiation as the mostcourageous political decision in education that had ever been taken in ourcountry. It also became the subject of almost endless debates which in fact

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are still continuing, although now from different standpoints. Thisdecision, which was taken in 1950, was actually only a decision to beginexperiments with a nine-year comprehensive school, but it became thestarting point for a 20-year period of turnover from the previous parallelsystem to a comprehensive system, first for the nine-year compulsory stageand later for the upper-secondary school, in which the academic, thegeneral and the technical-vocational programmes were restructured andput into one type of school, the so-called integrated gymnasium. Thesereforms were followed by the introduction of a new system of municipaladult education, and new structures for teacher training, educationalresearch and development, tertiary training at universities and colleges,and pre-school education.

Sweden is here of interest only as a mirror of what now seems to havebeen a global trend towards comprehensivization in the industrializedcountries after World War II. This comprehensivization seems always tohave been effected in three stages: first a policy declaration by a govern-mental committee, second a political decision by parliament and/orgovernment, and third an administrative application of the new schoolstructure decided upon.

The idea of comprehensive education is nothing new in WesternEurope, but it was first put into practice outside this area, namely in theUSA and USSR. At the beginning of this century the USA was the firstcountry to react to an emerging system of parallel schools, and to thesocial stratification which this system implied. With a view to democratiz-ing education, the US government in 1913 appointed a committee on thereorganization of secondary education. It submitted its final report in1918, called 'Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education'. By the termsof this report, the parallel system of Elementary Schools and High Schoolswas to be abolished and secondary education was to be organized for allyoung Americans until the age of 18. Development of the educationsystem along these lines was started in 1925, with federal support beingextended to new types of secondary education. The great expansion beganin the 1930s, during the Depression, when the period of compulsoryeducation was lengthened with the aid of both state and federal money.

The report on 'Cardinal Principles' provided the basis for most ofthese activities, and also for a number of evaluation reports. One of thesewas the 'Eight Years Study', published in five volumes in 1942. Thesereports resulted in the so-called 'Presser Resolution' in 1946 (C. A. Presserbeing the man charged with the task of summarizing these views). Accord-ing to this resolution the 20% of students who were well equipped to bene-fit from an academic education should be given their own specially gearedprogrammes. The 20% with a clearly vocational bent should similarly begiven their own programmes. New programmes for so-called 'life-

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adjustment training' should be designed for the remaining 60%. In thelate 1940s, this gave rise to what was termed in the USA the 'lifeadjustment movement', which in its turn became the subject of evalua-tions. Basically, the subject of all these evaluations, and of the criticismsin which these resulted, was simply various practical applications of the'Cardinal Principles' of 1918, or in other words the American compre-hensive. Beyond all doubt, these implementations have been of importancefor Western European champions of the comprehensive system. I knowthat this was the case in Sweden.

The development of a comprehensive school system in the USSR hascertain features in common with events in the USA. After the revolutionin 1917 the foundations were laid by a 'Declaration concerning a unitedlabour school', adopted by the Council of People's Commissars in 1918.By the terms of this declaration, all schools were to be state-operated andopen to all Soviet citizens, regardless of sex and nationality. No distinc-tions were to be made on grounds of social status, teaching was to be free,and grants were to be made available to those in need of them. Text-booksand school meals would also be free.

This clearly formulated comprehensive school programme gave rise toan intensive phase of development. By 1930 the number of schools hadmore than doubled. That year saw the first comprehensive school Act, anAct concerning a 'Public and Compulsory Teaching of Beginners', whichintroduced compulsory teaching for at least 4 years from the age of 8.From 1938 compulsory schooling in the towns was extended to 7 years,starting from the age of 7. In 1949 it was extended to 7 years in thecountry districts also. In towns it has subsequently been extended to10 years, between the ages of 7 and 17. In 1958, a minimum of 8 yearsof compulsory schooling was introduced in the country districts. At thesame time it was stipulated that all students should participate in regularwork outside the school on two out of the six school days in the week.This rule, the 'Khrushchov school reform', has since been modified toapply only to certain types of education.

The important point for our purposes is that these comprehensive move-ments in the USA and USSR preceded and influenced development inWestern Europe. The 'cardinal principles', known in the USA as the'Magna Carta' of education, have been of particular importance inWestern Europe. There are parallels to the 'cardinal principles' in Europe.In England they are found in the Spens Report of 1938 and in theEducation Act of 1944. In France the Langevin-Wallon Report of 1947gave rise to a series of experiments with 'classes nouvelles' and changestowards comprehensivization, the most recent being the 'Haby reform' of1975-

The era of comprehensivization has had certain distinctive features201

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which seem to be common to all the systems that are involved in thisprocess. .

Trend No i : Compulsory schooling has been extended to studentsaged 16. Will this trend go on? Will compulsory schooling be continuedto 17 or 18 ? My guess is that this will not happen. We can, in fact, observesignals for moves towards shortening it, for instance by allowing some'book-weary' students to do something other than study under the super-vision of a school even before 16, or assigning increased time for workexperience during school hours in industries, business, services etc. Thetrend of extending compulsory schooling seems to have 'hit the ceiling'.

Trend No 2: The differentiation of students into separate study pro-grammes has been postponed in several ways. In Sweden we now haveno organizational regrouping of students during compulsory educationexcept as a free choice of électives during 15-20% of the time in the lastthree grades. Will there be a further delay of differentiation until 17 or18 ? I do not think so. This trend, too, seems to have stopped. We can nowactually see slight tendencies to reintroduce flexible and part-time abilitygrouping in skill subjects within the classes. :

Trend No 3 : The putting together of different school types into oneorganizational structure also seems to have come to an end. Variationsare now appearing, but within the one system, not between parallelsystems. Ninety-eight per cent of primary and secondary students are incomprehensive schools. This trend has thus gone the whole hog. Themove is not seen as a return to parallel schools but as a trend to makeout-of-school work in industry, business, social services and in other areasan integral part of education. Contrary to what Ivan Mich and othercharismatic de-schooling prophets said some years ago, society is not beingde-schooled, rather it is being up-schooled. But there are trends towards achanged responsibility structure, with the school taking care of so-calledbasics and general knowledge, and working life taking care of specializa-tion. Another trend in comprehensivization is thus coming to an end. ;

Trend No 4: More and more students have stayed on in post-compul-sory schools. The frequency is now about 90%, where it seems to havestopped. Actually we regard this figure as far too high. Many of thesestudents do not want further studies immediately after compulsoryschool, although perhaps later. However, they do not have much option.This is a labour market problem and not a school problem. There is acorresponding stop in the previously increasing recruitment to higherstudies on the post-secondary level, at universities and colleges.

To my mind the fading away of these trends (and there are others)indicates that the comprehensive period has come to an end, and that weare in the beginning of a post-comprehensive era. What then is significantfor this development?

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The first new trend, politically and officially recognized, is theemergence of a new educational planning. During the 60s and 70s wetried to achieve a proper balance between different types of educationalprogrammes for different periods of people's lives. The new approachinvolves a deliberate alternation of periods of education and periods ofgainful employment in a life-long perspective. In a parliamentary decisionin 1975 on the reforming of the higher education system, it is stated thateducational planning as a whole shall be based on the principle of recur-rent education. This signifies an abandonment of the belief that educationshould be concentrated in a continuous period during youth, which is thenfollowed by an uninterrupted period of employment until retirement.

This brings us to .the second new trend, the emergence of a neweducational structure, primarily for post-compulsory education but assuch also of importance for compulsory school life. The idea of life-longlearning is far from new, but not until now, in the post-comprehensive era,has it been possible to put it into practice for people in general. I prefer tosee life-long learning as a realization of many dreams of equal opportunityin education, and the democratization of education and of social life ingeneral, and not in the same way as a friend of mine, who exclaimed:'Life-long learning, that sounds like a sentence for a serious crime!' Thenew structure involves alternating work and studies, the putting of theminto layers, the co-ordination of part-time work and part-time studies, andthe organization of courses in small and separate modules.

This is evident already in upper-secondary education. Of the 00% ofeach age bracket who now continue to upper-secondary school aftercompulsory school, many first take a year or more off and then resumetheir studies. In recent years this has been the case with 15-20% of allstudents. And also, after starting in upper secondary school, it is becomingcommon to take a year off and do something other than study. In otherwords, students themselves decide to alternate education and employment.

Increased possibilities to alternate or otherwise combine studies andemployment are now given through municipal adult education pro-grammes. In Sweden nearly 300,000 people now follow these pro-grammes, most of them in short evening courses, although a considerablenumber also take fullsecondary courses.

The most impressive figures which we have are in the so-called study-circles, once started by Sweden's traditional 'People's Movements', suchas labour unions, temperance movements, free churches, sporting organi-zations and co-operatives. Last year these study circles had nearly twoand a half million participants which is a lot in a population of 8.3 mil-lions. These circles admittedly have a short life, a minimum of 20 hours,and a great deal of their activity is training in guitar playing, pottery,amateur dramatics and other hobby-like subjects, but they also provide

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for regular school subjects, such as training in speaking and writing, inhow to conduct meetings and in union procedures.

Interesting trends are also appearing in the folk high schools, whichhave functioned for some hundred years as a second road to education;like the popular study-circles, they are a typically Scandinavian type ofeducation. The number of full-time students in folk high schools has notincreased since the early 70s, but the number taking short courses hasincreased in ten years from 14,000 to 200,000 per year.

A similar type of training is given, in small programme packages atcourse and conference centres, under the auspices of companies andorganizations. The scale of this training has also increased noticeably.Programmes of this type may also be regarded as foundation stones in anemerging system of recurrent education.

Corresponding trends have also been observed for some years at theuniversities and colleges. More than half the students starting there everyyear are now at least 25 years old. The number of young students, thosewho continue directly after secondary school is decreasing, while thenumber of older students with work experience is increasing. The numberof full-time students is decreasing, while the number of part-time studentsis increasing. Also, those studying for a full academic degree are nowfewer than before, whereas those attending university for a one-year orhalf-year course are more numerous. « .

The new rules for admission to higher education, which were intro-duced in 1977, made adults with work experience eligible for such educa-tion. Gainful employment entitles a person to additional qualifying pointsin the competition for places in study programmes that cannot accept allapplicants. This has meant major changes in the age, knowledge andexperience of those beginning higher education. In the long run, thepattern of recurrent education now developing may change not only therecruitment to higher studies but also the content of these studies andrecruitment patterns on the labour market. These new rules for admissionmade it difficult for young students to go directly from secondary schoolto the university. In 1980 a change was made to guarantee a certainproportion of the university places for such 'direct transfers'.

Nevertheless, with such a trend, experience from work and from adulteducation will be essential both in upper-secondary school and in highereducation. The borderlines between adult education and regular post-compulsory education are becoming more and more vague at the sametime as the need for training programmes of many different types becomeseven stronger.

Three important Acts were passed by the Swedish Parliament in 1975.One Act states the right of employees to be released for study and theirright to return to employment after these studies/According to a second

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Act, adult students are entitled to special subsidies, corresponding to ahigh proportion of a regular employment salary. And a third decision byParliament implies that the development of curricula and programmes forlabour market training shall be adjusted to the principles of recurrenteducation.

I said just now that a new planning, for a new school structure, isemerging. The compulsory school and the upper secondary school willcertainly continue. But the latter in particular is changing in a post-comprehensive system. Beside the full-time two- or three-year courses,there will be smaller modules. Actually the old secondary school likesecondary education itself is losing its boundaries both upwards and down-wards. The lower limit of 12 years of age loses its significance and mean-ing in a situation where all, by law, continue in education to the age of15 or 16 years. The secondary school's upper boundary is beginning to beas unclear as its lower boundary. The distinction at 18 between schooland university or between school and work is becoming increasinglyvague. In Sweden, the school-leaving exam has gone and its place hasbeen taken by a series of credentials attesting to something known eitheras 'general competence' or, as it applies to a specific subject, 'specialcompetence'. Frequently there is no clear boundary at all between theend of school and the beginning of a vocational career, or between the endof school and the beginning of higher education.

The once clearly defined secondary-school stage has given way to astage with two clearly separated parts, but with a much less identifiablebeginning and end. The 15-16-year-old boundary between lower andupper secondary school has become the most important and thus thetraditional divisions between secondary and primary education, andbetween secondary and higher education are, in practice, dead andburied. [The reorganized stages of education have already been outlinedin English in Comparative Education, October 1980: I repeat thesepoints here by permission of the Editor of Comparative Education.] Anumber of consequences follow from the boundary changes. An initialone is that schools are now built for the age groups 6-15 and not 6-12 aswas previously the case.

Secondly, and as a corollary to the above, teachers are beginning to betrained for students in the 6-15 age group and not just for those betweenthe ages of 6-12. In Sweden, some teachers have had their jobs re-definedso that they are now responsible for pupils in the 9-15 age group.

A third consequence is that primary school teachers now receive theirtraining at the tertiary level, even in those countries where this educationwas previously given in so-called normal schools at a level which mostnearly corresponded to the upper secondary.

A fourth implication of the bridging of educational stages between205

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primary and secondary school has been that primary school teachershave received an expanded opportunity for further training, especially toqualify as secondary school teachers. When, during the post-war period,the lower levels of secondary education were broadened to include all oralmost all in the age-group concerned, this was made possible, by andlarge, by the availability of up-graded primary school teachers who filledthe majority of the teaching vacancies at the lower secondary level duringthese early years of expansion. In Denmark, for example, this procedurehas been fully incorporated into the system so that today lower secondaryteachers come almost exclusively from the ranks of up-graded primaryschoolteachers.

A fifth implication has been that the primary and lower secondarysectors have been placed under the same responsible authority. Previously,primary education in many countries, including the Scandinavian, was alocal government responsibility whereas secondary education was theconcern of central government. Both have now become the responsibilityof thé local community or local authority.

This, in turn, prepares the way for the sixth and final implication,namely that the school for 6-15-year-olds is now under the personalauthority of one and the same headmaster and is serviced by the samecorps of teachers. The levels above have, similarly, been given their ownsupervisory staff and their own teachers. In the same manner each of thenew levels has received its own integrated system for educational financing,providing learning materials, school meals, school health services, andother support services.

If the new educational stage begins at 15-16, where then does it end?The answer is quite simply that there is no clear end point. Rather,students finish at various points and can resume their studies at almostany time in the future.

An additional indication of the weakening of the educational boundaryat the 18-year-old level, and perhaps of its ultimate disappearance, is seenin the increased tendency to combine courses at the secondary level(gymnasium courses) with courses at the university and college level. Inthis way a student can find himself simultaneously at both the secondaryand tertiary stage. In much the same way it is increasingly common toengage in 'parallel study' or otherwise combine popular education (i.e.1

study circles), labour-market training and university education, so thatthe earlier, once distinct, point in a student's life when he or she left schooland went to the university, is today increasingly difficult to perceive.

Possibly, one can observe the emergence of a new educational stagebeginning at about the age of 22 or at the point where the student hascompleted his or her basic degree. This boundary represents a divisionbetween basic studies and post-graduate research and is therefore applic-

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able only to a relatively small number of students. With the generalizingof the undergraduate part of higher education, the research componentof this type of study has decreased while the vocational component has,correspondingly, increased. Independent research activities have beenpushed forward to the 'graduate' level, something which many feel to bean unfortunate development. In Sweden, in recent years, attempts havebeen made to reverse this process and special funds have been allocated tore-establish the connection between research and undergraduate studiesat the tertiary level.

Added together the new trends show that the comprehensivization ofcompulsory education gives a new post-compulsory structure. The post-comprehensive era is an era of recurrent education.

Some critics of the comprehensive school reform may indulge inexpectation of a return to the old 'parallel system' of schools, hoping thatthe post-comprehensive era will be an era of de-comprehensivization. Mybelief is that such a hope is, at least partly, in vain. The comprehensivesystem is strongly established at the compulsory school levels. It is nowdeeply rooted in people's minds. The system of free choice of subjects andstudy programmes is regarded almost as a human right. A re-introductionof a 'pass-fail' limit in the compulsory school would probably be impos-sible today.

This does not mean that the comprehensive system will remain foreverprecisely as it is at present. Last year the Swedish Parliament enacted newcentral curricular guidelines ('Iäroplan') for the compulsory school: theopportunities for individual choice of study courses are increased, and thelocal education authorities are given increased responsibilities for cur-riculum planning and use of public resources. But the actual principle ofcomprehensiveness was fully accepted by all political parties in Parlia-ment.

It is interesting to notice that these new trends towards a greatervariation in individual and local programmes are emerging now, whennew routes to different kinds of further studies have just been created.Choices of subjects and courses in the compulsory school, and after thatin the upper-secondary school, are now less decisive than before for thefuture of the student. It looks as if the reshaping and improving of thecomprehensive system had to wait until the higher education system wasmade more open and until a system of recurrent training was becomingclear.

The post-comprehensive problems are both many and different. Howshould the different kinds of post-compulsory education which now existbe organized to cater for the new requirements ? Who should be respon-sible for financing and administering this education? How can industryand commerce be made aware of their responsibility for the continuing

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education of the individual, even when it does not appear to be con-structed to suit the working life with which it alternates, and how areintervals between studies to be filled with work that will benefit the studiesthat are pursued later on ?

Major questions remain to be answered and they can no longer beignored. A wide policy for both education and employment is needed.The next educational reform might in fact be so radical as to constitute areform of society in a wider sense. Too complicated, you say. I don'tthink so. To do nothing would mean that we accept the play of un-controlled and conflicting forces, as being out of reach for action. Partialsolutions are already in the pipeline, but it remains unclear as yet whocan and should assume responsibility for any more integral solutions.

One final and essential question in this whole complex is whether afreely emergent system of recurrent education will bring us closer to theequality and the democracy that have been the guiding stars of our post-war education policy, or whether it will constitute a new mechanism forsocial segregation and stratification.

Educational studies and educational research can help us to find solu-tions. Actions are needed here. There certainly are no universal panaceas.Solutions cannot be imported or exported. They are not international.But trends in educational development are international.

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