At DN Debatt, Helén Svensson claims that assessment of swimming ability can and should be a model for validation of every other learning in school. According to her, all human abilities, in addition to physical, also mental / cognitive and emotional, can and should be measured and compared. With her book “The Immeasurable Renaissance”, Jonna Bornemark has on the contrary marked that the fixation on measuring competence, not only of the head but also of the hand and the heart, erodes the human in our lives.
Here I want to address another aspect of learning that contrasts swimming instruction in its current forms and thus its potential as a role model in terms of validation of skills. Children and young people’s learning in everyday life takes place experimentally, by trying their hand at it. This is part of their maturation process.
Therefore, it is important that the school practices teaching methods that harmonize with this form of knowledge and experience intake. The introduction of “absolute” measures of competence such as swimming skills counteracts this natural process.
This is how they learn, among other things, that value is something that is created in the eye of the beholder.
The introduction of “entrepreneurial” learning with its desire to experiment in school has been used with varying degrees of success as a means of integrating children’s and schools’ ways of knowing. In addition to affirming and reinforcing children’s natural abilities, experimentation can even stimulate the learning of mathematics. By, for example, letting primary school children compete in adding and subtracting numbers in time – singular in primary school, tens in middle school and hundreds in high school – a play element is introduced in the formal world of mathematics.
For older school students, direct close contact between school and “reality” is the best learning environment. In a panel debate on entrepreneurship education at the university level at the turn of the century, Assar Lindbeck, professor of economics, said that the most effective way to identify the most entrepreneurial students in a group would be to send them all out of town with a box of hot dogs on their stomachs. Those who first sold out were the best entrepreneurial subjects.
But the layout can be done even more creative. In an ongoing education program in Stockholm, the participating young people are given the challenge of increasing their capital through concrete barter. The best in tests so far is the group that after a chain of exchanges managed to turn a pencil into a car (unclear in what condition). This is how they learn, among other things, that value is something that is created in the eye of the beholder.
Helén Svensson’s “swimming school model” is thus unable to handle learning that is not mechanical but also affirms the children’s and young people’s own abilities and interests. Instead of taming them with rules and requirements that make them able to swim in calm water, their willingness and ability to swim against the current like entrepreneurs should be considered and affirmed.