For several days now, the idea that Sweden is “returning” from digitization has been circulating intensively. That they are giving up screens, technology, the digital enthusiasm of recent years. And for many of us the temptation is great: if even Sweden returns to books and handwriting, maybe digitalization in school was, in fact, a mistake.
Except that's not the real lesson. And we'd better get it right, before we miss another reform.
Digital school
Sweden is not giving up on technology. Give up the illusion that technology alone produces learning. After years of massive investments in devices, platforms and apps, the data showed them something uncomfortable: if you weaken deep reading, attention and the ability to focus, even the most modern digital tools can no longer save the results. So they do what mature systems do: they don't go back to the past, they recalibrate their order of priorities.
The important question is not what Sweden is doing. The important question is where we are in all of this.
Because, before we discuss “too much digital”, we should have the honesty to admit a simple thing: Romania has, in fact, never had a real digitization of education.
We have confused digitization with the delivery of hardware that no one really uses, with compulsory “digital pedagogy” courses formally ticked off by thousands of teachers sent to meaningless training, with diplomas distributed in heaps and with the permanent fight against reports (international or domestic) that consistently tell us that we are bad at digital skills.
We reassured ourselves by saying that we have smart boards. Meanwhile, the kids use them during breaks to put on their playlist of questionable music. And we ask ourselves, seriously, rhetorically, what is wrong with digitization.
Another symptom of this pseudo-digitalization is the obsession with platforms. We have educational content platforms that exist but are not used. Content created, purchased or licensed that almost no one sees. Platforms that are not integrated into teaching, assessment, teacher or school decisions, but which give us, at the system level, the illusion of modernization.
And instead of wondering why the existing ones are not being used, we prepare new ones. Likewise. With the same promises. With the same predictable result.
The truth is simple and inconvenient: digitization doesn't work because, in reality, we've never tried it. But we are already convinced that it does not work.
Real digitization is not about devices. It doesn't mean apps. It does not mean training degrees.
It means learning data. It means comparable assessment. It means quick intervention when a child falls behind. It means teachers who know what they're doing with technology, not just have taken a class about it.
And above all, it means one essential thing: technology is good if and only if it is subordinated to real learning.
Here, Sweden's lesson is correct. But jumping to the conclusion—that the solution would be less digital—is dangerous for a country that hasn't even built any sense of basic infrastructure.
Without deep reading, attention and critical thinking, digital does not help. But without digital infrastructure, data and real assessment, learning cannot progress either.
Reform is not a choice between book and screen. Reformation is the right order of things.
Perhaps the real lesson from Sweden is not about fewer screens. Maybe it's about having the courage to say: I've invested in things that don't work out the way I'd hoped. And about the maturity to correct the direction.
And the awkward question, which we still avoid asking, remains this:
What would happen if we finally measured not what we teach, but what and where children learn?
Maybe only then we would discover where the problem actually is. And where the reform really begins.
