Having lauded Swedish PM Fredrik Reinfeldt
the other day, it is saddening that there more than enough idiocy to go round in the land of ice and snow, judging from this
sorry tale:
"A school principal in southern Sweden has banned pupils from posing for class photos wearing national team shirts containing Swedish flags. Since national flags may be perceived by some as xenophobic, eighth grade pupils in Karlshamn have been ordered to wear less inflammatory garb for a photo to be published in the school yearbook. "Anybody looking at the photo could view it as a political demonstration," (Erm, or perhaps a football team?) principal Pär Blondell Strandskolan told news agency TT....Blondell stuck to his guns, arguing that the pupils risked inadvertently earning themselves a bad reputation. People could begin speculating about "the racists from Karlshamn" once the yearbook began being distributed".
Now I like yellow shirts considerably more than the next man, but the Swedish national team's shirt is hardly a thing of beauty:
Being older than dirt, I remember compulsory school uniforms, and think that they have much to recommend them, but presumably our Scandinavian chums did away with uniforms a long time ago. As Quentin Crisp put it, "
The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.”Returning to the point at hand, it is notable that the headmaster is presumably happy enough for his charges to sport these shirts on days when they are not being photographed, and thus it suggests that he is more concerned about any perception of xenophobia than whether his charges will follow that all so slippery slope from wearing the national colours to abusing new Swedes, to beating them up to over-enthusiastic attempts to emulate
Charles XII and invading Sweden's neighbours on the other side of the Baltic.
Labels: education, Sweden
