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EDUCATION

Human body parts pose dilemma for Swedish schools

Changing social attitudes have left dozens of Swedish schools with a dilemma: what to do with the human skeletons, organs and foetuses still being stored in their biology labs?

Published: 14 November 2016 08:27 CET
Human body parts pose dilemma for Swedish schools
This skeleton is in the Swedish Ethnographical Museum, not a school. Photo: Johan Engman / TT

A new survey of the country's 24 oldest upper secondary schools showed that 80 percent of them were storing some kind of human remains. 

Most of the remains ended up in schools in the early 1900s, at which time there was a widespread trade in body parts, according to Swedish Radio's science programme, Vetenskapsradio.

Many of the items were taken without permission, for instance from patients who died in mental hospitals or miscarried foetuses.

Biology teacher Eleonore Gåvsten at Stockholm's Södra Latin school told Swedish Radio that the body parts were not shown to pupils, “but there's no way to get rid of these old things, that's the problem.”

EDUCATION

Sweden’s Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

Sweden's opposition Social Democrats have called for a total ban on the establishment of new profit-making free schools, in a sign the party may be toughening its policies on profit-making in the welfare sector.

Published: 18 April 2024 16:09 CEST
Sweden's Social Democrats call for ban on new free schools

“We want the state to slam on the emergency brakes and bring in a ban on establishing [new schools],” the party’s leader, Magdalena Andersson, said at a press conference.

“We think the Swedish people should be making the decisions on the Swedish school system, and not big school corporations whose main driver is making a profit.” 

Almost a fifth of pupils in Sweden attend one of the country’s 3,900 primary and secondary “free schools”, first introduced in the country in the early 1990s. 

Even though three quarters of the schools are run by private companies on a for-profit basis, they are 100 percent state funded, with schools given money for each pupil. 

This system has come in for criticism in recent years, with profit-making schools blamed for increasing segregation, contributing to declining educational standards and for grade inflation. 

In the run-up to the 2022 election, Andersson called for a ban on the companies being able to distribute profits to their owners in the form of dividends, calling for all profits to be reinvested in the school system.  

READ ALSO: Sweden’s pioneering for-profit ‘free schools’ under fire 

Andersson said that the new ban on establishing free schools could be achieved by extending a law banning the establishment of religious free schools, brought in while they were in power, to cover all free schools. 

“It’s possible to use that legislation as a base and so develop this new law quite rapidly,” Andersson said, adding that this law would be the first step along the way to a total ban on profit-making schools in Sweden. 

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