The science of learning and the Swedish school
When evidence meets a progressive yet profit-driven school system
In this Substack, I will continuously report for international readers on what happens when the science of learning (SoL) encounters the Swedish school system. SoL is a body of knowledge that, through systematic evidence from educational psychology, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, shows how teaching can be aligned with human cognitive architecture. The field provides teachers with concrete, evidence-informed strategies and gives them both professional tools and a shared language for instructional decision-making.
Like in many other countries, SoL has gained growing interest in Sweden. Yet, the Swedish context makes this encounter particularly interesting. For several decades, Sweden has been characterized by a progressive educational tradition and an extensive digitalization of schooling, both endorsed by policymakers and academia. At the same time, Sweden has one of the world’s most far-reaching systems of independent schools, built on Milton Friedman’s “voucher” idea, allowing schools to operate for profit.
I will write in English about how debates around SoL unfold within the Swedish educational landscape. This first post offers an overview of the current situation as I see it.
Politics at the helm, grassroots at the heart
As in several other countries, the call to make teaching more evidence-informed is not primarily driven by academics in education but by politicians. However, it should be recognized that the political agenda is supported by a grassroots movement of teachers who see the value of SoL. These are teachers who have grown weary of publicly funded research that promises to help them in their work but offers little in terms of practical benefit.
In policy discussions, there is growing frustration that international evidence on effective teaching practices remains underused in Swedish classrooms. The current right-wing government is undertaking a number of major school reforms. The national curriculum and subject syllabi are being revised, and initial teacher training is under review. A central aim of this reform agenda is to embed SoL principles—introducing knowledge about strategies such as cognitive load, retrieval practice, and spaced learning, among others. Early reading instruction is to be based on phonics, and emphasis is placed on the importance of foundational knowledge before more complex cognitive skills can develop.
The fact that these reforms are primarily politically driven unfortunately means that the scientific discussion does not get a fair hearing. Those who have listened to Emily Hanford’s Sold a Story podcast will recognize what happened when the science of reading gained support from the Bush administration: the science was stigmatized as a right-wing political project. Critics could dismiss the research with ad hominem arguments rather than engaging with the empirical evidence. We now see similar processes surrounding SoL in Sweden.
Two competing ideological narratives
For years, Sweden’s debate about declining school results has been framed in overly simple, one-sided terms. The political left blames marketization and profit motives; the political right blames progressive ideals and constructivist approaches for undermining knowledge and discipline. These two narratives lock participants into confirmation biases that make genuine scientific clarity difficult. The debate often rests on monocausal explanations—assuming that a single factor can account for a complex, multifaceted phenomenon—something no serious researcher would ever claim.
Conceptual confusion
A further complication is that political reports and reform documents use the term cognitive science rather than the science of learning. The content being requested—evidence-informed teaching strategies grounded in human cognitive architecture—is SoL, not cognitive science in its broader sense. This terminological confusion has led to misconceptions, such as the idea that the reforms primarily call for neuroscience. As a result, SoL’s century-long connection to educational psychology—and to figures such as William James, Edward Thorndike, B. F. Skinner, Clark Hull, Robert Gagné, David Ausubel, William Kaye Estes, and Albert Bandura, among others—becomes invisible.
Many Swedish education scholars perceive SoL as an attempt by another discipline to colonize their domain of expertise. This tension is intensified by the fact that experimental, psychological educational research has all but vanished in Sweden. There is a strong dominance of qualitative over quantitative methods. A bibliometric study mapping Swedish educational research from 2000–2020 concluded that:
“The quantitative research paradigm, which once was seen as the hegemonic method of educational research, now warrants special care and attention to prevent it from being obliterated from the methodological repertoire of large parts of Swedish scholarship on education.” (Nylander, 2023)
Didaktik as a dominant tradition
When it comes to questions about teaching and learning, educational psychology has been largely absent in Sweden, taught in teacher training mostly as historical background. Instead, the concept of didaktik dominates—a term that does not correspond directly to the English word didactics. The closest translation would be pedagogy or instruction, but didaktik also refers to a specific Nordic-German research tradition that, since the 1980s, has positioned itself as an alternative to psychological and experimental educational research.
In this tradition, claims about effective teaching are based primarily on conceptual or philosophical reasoning rather than empirical testing. The concept has become so pervasive that, when applying for research grants from the Swedish Research Council—the country’s main funding body—there is no category other than didaktik that fits a project focusing on teaching and instruction.
As a result, Swedish academic education as a discipline is exceptionally ill-prepared to engage with the psychological and experimental foundations of SoL. Experimental methods are viewed as something outdated—part of a bygone scientific paradigm.
This has produced a heated educational debate between, on one side, politicians, teachers working with SoL, and a handful of scholars familiar with the field (of which I am one), and on the other side, mainstream educational researchers, skeptical teachers, and commercial training companies promoting non-evidence-based methods.
Power, ideology, and academic self-interest
The debate rarely concerns specific studies or the state of evidence. Instead, it operates at a meta-theoretical level. One striking feature is that many education scholars view cognitive science as “just another theory.” Here, “theory” does not mean a supported hypothesis about reality but rather the conceptual lens used to frame qualitative inquiry. For these academics, theory is not something one arrives at—it is the starting point.
From that standpoint, researchers react strongly when they perceive a particular “theory” to have received political endorsement. In their view, this signals an unwarranted privileging of one discourse over others. Yet SoL and cognitive science are not theories—they are fields of research, producing hundreds of more specific theories (e.g., cognitive load theory, new theory of disuse, semantic network theory, spreading activation theory) with varying degrees of empirical support. What is being endorsed politically is not a single worldview or doctrine but rather the best available body of evidence on how learning occurs and how teaching can be designed to support it.
This makes the debate both polarized and difficult to navigate. Critics often argue against their own caricatured version of SoL rather than engaging with the literature. Scholars from critical or sociological traditions see it as part of their activist duty to resist what they perceive as a right-wing project. I would argue that, much like commercial training providers, some academics are also protecting their own intellectual and institutional self-interests, fearing that philosophical and sociological traditions will lose funding to more psychological and experimental work.
Teachers caught in the crossfire
In the midst of this confusion stand the teachers. They are rarely represented in the public debate. Recently, one Swedish education scholar even proposed that we should downplay phonics, abolish the Swedish language subject altogether (which corresponds to both English language and English literature), and instead introduce a new subject called communication, focusing on symbols and memes in a multimodal society. No actual teachers of Swedish were invited to comment; instead, politicians and journalists debated the idea in the major media outlets.
Some Swedish teachers and school leaders—seasoned by decades of research that has failed to provide concrete guidance for effective teaching—have discovered SoL on their own. Their encounters with the field are often transformative. I myself work with professional development in SoL for teachers, and it feels as though a snowball has begun to roll, driven by grassroots momentum rather than political decree.
It is within this complex and polarized landscape that I will be reporting in this Substack. I hope international readers will find it illuminating to follow how the science of learning takes root in the Swedish context—and I invite you to share how the conversation about SoL unfolds in your own countries.