Revolution in Swedish schools

Why is Sweden spending millions to ditch iPads and put books, pens and notebooks back at the heart of schooling?

Sweden is putting textbooks back at the center of schooling, putting the brakes on screens and reopening a conflict that affects all education systems. In Swedish classrooms, the noise that the government wants to bring back to the forefront is reminiscent of that of a few decades ago: pages being turned, pencils crunching on paper, pens loosely held in children's hands.

Since 2023, Stockholm has chosen a very clear line: in class, reading, writing and arithmetic are a priority once again, with paper and pen to replace the continuous reflection of screens. This course correction involves the return of physical books, handwriting, the idea of schools without cell phones for the entire day, and a return to paper format for national primary school tests, and a turnaround even in nurseries and kindergartens, where traditional tools are now preferred.

The economic aspect makes this shift even more concrete. For textbooks and teacher guides, the Swedish government has earmarked 685 million kronor for 2023, or just over 63 million euros by mid-April 2026. The official line is to ensure a paper textbook for every pupil and every subject. 176 million crowns were added to this fund in 2024 for the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books in schools as well as early childhood facilities, followed by 480 million in 2025. In the meantime, further funding has been secured for school libraries with dedicated staff and to operationalize the future restriction on telephones. In a country of just ten and a half million inhabitants, sums of this magnitude carry very visible political weight.\

The reversal is rooted in a long-simmering malaise in Sweden. Researcher Linda Fälth, a specialist in teacher training at Linnaeus University, explains that  reinvestment in physical media and the reduction of the emphasis on screens came in the wake of growing doubts about the scientific soundness of school digitization.

A wider cultural re-examination was opened up around the doubt in question: time spent in front of screens, distraction, loss of in-depth reading, difficulty in maintaining attention, increasingly fragile handwriting. The idea behind the reform is clear: basic skills need to be consolidated early on, and physical books are seen as a more suitable medium for achieving this.

In the PISA 2022 data, compared to 2018, Sweden has lost ground compared in mathematics and reading, returning to 2012 levels, which were the lowest observed in these two areas. The precise relationship between digitization and declining learning remains difficult to isolate, but some research continues to see an advantage to paper-based reading, particularly in the face of texts that explain, describe, organize information and require a more disciplined cognitive effort as opposed to narrative texts.

At the same time, the OECD, in a diagnostic report published in 2026 at the request of the Swedish government, paints a less ideological and more nuanced picture: in Sweden, students use digital resources to learn more than their peers in many other OECD countries; moderate use can be associated with better results, while abuse, misuse and intensive consumption for leisure purposes during school time go hand in hand with poorer performance. The Swedish line therefore looks more like a stricter delimitation of times and ages of use, rather than a total expulsion of digital technology.

The government, moreover, openly affirms that digital tools have their place when they really help learning, and that digital competence remains an objective, especially in the most advanced classes. The difference lies in the order of priorities. First come solid reading, legible writing, the ability to concentrate and arithmetic. The rest comes later. It's a sequence that seems elementary, yet in many school systems it had been reversed with almost automatic assurance.

As early as the 1980s, the technology industry pushed the school towards the computer as a symbol of modernization; then the internet, laptops, tablets and platforms reshaped the way of being in the classroom. Some in the education world continue to see real advantages in this approach: more interactive courses, more accessible content, more personalized learning paths.

The widely shared feeling is that the subject is no longer about innovation as an abstraction. It's about dosage, rhythm, the right age, the boundary between support and invasion. For years, the Swedish school was presented as a digital avant-garde. Today, its course correction carries weight far beyond the Nordic borders, because it poses a simple and terribly concrete question: how much technology can basic learning really handle?
 

(©GreenMe.it 2026 / Managing Editor: Malvina Parker - The Global Lifestyle / Pic: ©Unsplash)