Saab and the superiority of Swedish education

You may or may not be aware that last December Saab was declared bankrupt and production of their cars has now ended. This now begs a question of the superiority of the Swedish education system over that of other countries, and more importantly, whether the ideology of near compulsory schooling from nursery to the age of 18 is a recipe for economic success or not. Since 1980 Swedish unemployment has always been stubbornly high and following the collapse of a major industry employing thousands of highly skilled individuals it is only sensible that the Swedish education system is put under the spotlight. About 5 years ago I read in the Daily Mail that Sweden was the role model for the future of the Labour Party's ideology. Some time later I read an article on the internet that Sweden was one of three countries used as sources of inspiration for reforms to the state school system in Britain.

At least the Germans have the success of Volkswagen and BMW to back up Hitler's legislation of compulsory schooling. What do the Swedish have now to back up their system of near compulsory schooling whilst home education is next to impossible?

Sweden was once one of the world's great powers that is now rapidly heading in the direction of becoming a spent force. The days of when the Swedes were envied by the world are long since gone and their education system is looking like it's stuck in the last century. Even worse is the way that Sweden was once admired for its high level of social cohesion. In recent years much civil unrest and tensions between natives and recently arrived foreigners have put a scar on the face of the nation.

My son thinks that the laws should be changed so that whenever a significant company like Saab goes bankrupt, its designs and intellectual property are open sourced. The reasons for this are threefold: To prevent an undeserving company from taking them; to ensure that support and spare parts can be made available to owners of products from the company; and to enable future development of the company's products to take place. The current insolvency laws mean that assets of bankrupt companies are sold to whoever the official receivers want to sell them to - often those who are willing to pay the most. That way they could be sold to an undeserving party or end up mothballed.