Long celebrated as one of Europe’s most digitally advanced nations, Sweden is now undergoing a dramatic reversal of its decades-long push to integrate screens into every level of classroom learning. The country’s current right-wing coalition government, elected in 2022, has launched a high-profile initiative under the slogan ‘från skärm till pärm’ — ‘from screen to binder’ — that prioritizes traditional pen-and-paper learning, physical textbooks and analogue tools in an effort to reverse years of declining national literacy scores. This policy has sparked fierce debate across education, tech and political circles, dividing experts, students and stakeholders over what balance of analogue and digital learning best serves Sweden’s youth.
Sweden’s rapid adoption of digital education tools began more than 15 years ago. Laptops entered mainstream classroom use across the country in the late 2000s and early 2010s, and official data from 2015 shows roughly 80% of students at state-funded municipal high schools had individual access to a personal digital device by that point. In 2019, the previous Social Democrat-led administration went a step further, mandating tablet use in pre-schools as part of a broader strategy to equip even the youngest Swedes for a fully digital workforce and personal life.
But that era of universal digital expansion has come to an abrupt end under the new government. Joar Forsell, education spokesperson for the Liberal Party — whose leader heads Sweden’s education ministry — made clear the administration’s core goal: ‘We’re trying, actually, to get rid of screens as much as possible. With higher ages in school you might use them a little bit more, but with lower ages, or in school, I don’t think we should use screens at all.’
Policy changes have already rolled out across the country. Starting in 2025, pre-schools are no longer required to integrate digital tools into their curriculum, and tablets are no longer distributed to children under the age of two. Later this year, a full ban on mobile phones in schools — even for educational purposes — will go into effect. To support the transition to analogue learning, the government has allocated more than 2.1 billion Swedish krona ($200 million) in grants for schools to purchase new physical textbooks and print teaching materials, and a revised national curriculum centered on textbook-based instruction is scheduled to launch in 2028.
The policy shift directly responds to Sweden’s sliding performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), the OECD’s global benchmark for core academic skills. Once a top-performing nation in global education rankings, Sweden saw its PISA scores plummet in 2012. After a short period of modest recovery, the country recorded another significant drop in reading and mathematics scores in 2022. While Sweden still scores slightly above the OECD average, it now trails peer Nordic nations including Denmark and Finland, as well as the UK and the U.S., in literacy. Alarmingly, 24% of 15- to 16-year-old Swedish students fail to reach a basic level of reading comprehension.
Government supporters and some researchers argue that excessive screen use is the core cause of these declining results. Dr. Sissela Nutley, a neuroscientist affiliated with Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, is one of the leading academic voices backing the shift. She notes that screen-based learning creates constant distractions, as students are distracted by peer activity on other devices. ‘There’s been an increased awareness of the disruption that technology is causing in classrooms,’ Nutley explained, adding that a growing body of international research shows digital text reading impairs information processing for children, and heavy screen exposure may negatively impact brain development in younger learners. Forsell echoed this view, arguing: ‘Reading real books and writing on real paper, and counting with real numbers on real paper, is much better if you want kids to get the knowledge they need.’
The OECD, however, has taken a more nuanced stance. A January 2024 OECD report on Swedish education concluded that, overall, Swedish students derive net benefits from access to digital learning tools. The report did acknowledge the widespread problem of digital distraction in Swedish classrooms, and found that heavy, unstructured device use in math classes correlated with lower test scores — though even those students still outperformed peers who had no access to digital tools at all. Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education, warned against drawing simple cause-and-effect conclusions, but noted that Sweden’s earlier tech adoption was unusually unplanned compared to other countries: ‘It just put a lot of devices and technology into classrooms without clear pedagogical intent, without clear goalposts.’
The government’s policy has drawn particularly sharp criticism from Sweden’s powerful tech and edtech sectors. Jannie Jeppesen, CEO of industry trade group Swedish Edtech Industry and a former teacher, warned that a wholesale shift to analogue learning will leave Swedish students underprepared for the modern workforce. ‘Everybody needs digital basic skills in order to enter the workforce,’ Jeppesen said, pointing to a recent EU estimate that 90% of all jobs will require baseline digital skills in the near future.
Jeppesen also warned that the policy threatens Sweden’s status as Europe’s leading tech unicorn hub per capita — home to global successes including Spotify and AI legal platform Legora. If Swedish schools fail to train students in core digital skills, she argues, growing tech companies will relocate to other regions where they can access a skilled workforce: ‘These types of companies will move elsewhere if they can’t find the right IT competences in Sweden.’
Critics also point to growing concerns around AI literacy and equity. While the government has announced plans to introduce AI lessons in secondary schools, many education experts argue that excluding AI education from primary school curricula will widen the digital divide between wealthy and low-income students. Professor Linnéa Stenliden, of Linköping University’s Department of Behavioral Sciences, explains that children from affluent households are far more likely to get access to AI learning support from their parents at home, leaving lower-income students further behind. ‘Without such measures, younger children from richer families, whose parents are more likely to be able to help them understand how to use AI tools, will gain an advantage,’ Stenliden warned.
Forsell rejects these criticisms, arguing that basic literacy and numeracy skills must come before advanced digital training, and denies the policy will widen inequality: ‘You can only give people the opportunities that inequality is taking away from them, by giving them proper education.’ Jeppesen dismisses this framing as populist, arguing that the focus on digital versus analogue learning distracts from more pressing issues impacting Swedish education outcomes, including unequal distribution of educational resources and inconsistent teaching quality highlighted in a March 2024 report from Sweden’s National Education Agency.
On the ground at a Nacka high school just outside Stockholm, where the policy shift is already being implemented, student opinions mirror the national divide. Final-year student Sophie, 18, says the shift is already visible in daily classes: ‘I now go home from school with new books and papers often. One teacher has started printing all the texts that we use during the lesson, while a digital learning platform in maths lessons has been swapped out for textbook-only teaching.’
Eighteen-year-old Alexis, another final-year student, supports the change, saying he has watched younger generations lose focus due to constant internet access: ‘The internet has kind of taken over the younger generations, and I’ve noticed them kind of lose focus easier. I don’t want my younger siblings to use digital tools in school as much as my generation did.’ But 19-year-old Jasmine disagrees, arguing that digital learning better reflects the reality of modern life: ‘Let’s focus more on computers. Because if we are being realistic, the whole world is using computers.’
As the policy rolls out across the country over the next three years, all sides will be watching closely to see whether returning to pen and paper can reverse Sweden’s declining literacy — or whether it will leave a generation of Swedish students ill-prepared for an increasingly digital global economy.