Further Implications of the IEA Studies in the Mother Tongue

The students in Swedish comprehensive high schools are, in relation to the socially and economically more privileged students, linguistically, academically, and attitudinally handicapped; and Swedish educators have apparently not been a great deal more successful in remediating the handicaps of their environmentally disadvantaged students than have American educators. During the last 25 years Sweden has made a series of school reforms, changing a highly selective educational system into a comprehensive system. The organisational reforms have opened the schools to new and large groups of students, who come from widely different home backgrounds and in that sense represent the whole society. Several countries are now reforming - or are planning to reform - their educational systems in the same direction as Sweden has done. Thus, the Swedish case is not a unique case, and the Swedish data may have implications beyond our own educational system. Some of the problems in the teaching of the mother tongue and literature which we are now facing in Sweden may soon be felt as problems in other countries too. In this paper I shall present some results from a special analysis of the Swedish data which has recently been published (Hansson, 1975) . In discussing the implications of these results I shall mainly pay attention to three aspects of the teaching of mother tongue: 1) What do the results show about the verbal education of the socially and culturally less favoured groups of students who have only recently been given access to higher education? 2) Are there any specific factors in the home background and in school conditions that seem to lead to low reading ability and little interest in reading? 3) Why are the Swedish so negative about the study of literature? The international analysis of the achievement of the best 9, 5 and 1% students has indicated that comprehensive school systems with large proportions of students still in school at the age of 18 do not yield fewer high-achieving students than more selective systems do (Purves, 1973) . In a comprehensive school system the average score of the age group still in school may be lower, but the achievement of the best students in such a system is of equal standard with that of the best students in a more selective system. Thus, the IEA-data do not support the view that school reforms, which open up the schools to

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