Lemon sponge cake

Returning to Gothenburg after two intensive days in Halmstad, I allow myself the indulgence of SJ’s new lemon sponge cake as I reflect on today’s lecture by our new guest professor Jonas Linderoth. Having made a name as one of the strongest advocates of cognitivism and evidence-based thinking in recent Swedish school debates, much of what Linderoth said resonated with me.

Yet, there is something in his singular focus on “what works” that troubles me when applied to higher education. What ideally sets university education apart is not efficiency but doubt, the cultivation of critical distance, of questioning one’s own knowledge and confronting one’s own prejudices. Recognizing human fallibility and making students sceptical of totalizing claims should be at the very heart of liberal education. In that sense, Linderoth’s instructionist paradigm risks feeding into the broader deintellectualization of higher education which I wrote about in my recent article on HyFlex teaching.