Given Hjällboskolan's diversity, Katarina and Suman's friendship might be expected to be the norm. Only 15% of Hjällboskolan's 430 students are so-called native Swedes—those with long-standing roots in the country—so you might think that most of them would, like Katarina, study alongside their immigrant peers, developing friendships along the way. Not so. Most of Hjällboskolan's classrooms and most of Gothenburg's schools are, in effect, segregated.
In just a few decades Sweden's small, once homogenous population has undergone dramatic transformation. While immigrants constituted just 4% of the population in 1960, today more than a fifth of the country's nearly 9 million inhabitants are either immigrants or have at least one non-Swedish parent. Prior waves of migrants, like the Finns who arrived after World War II, assimilated quickly into Swedish society, their transition facilitated by racial affinity and the fact that the dominant culture was never seriously challenged. Today's newcomers are more likely to be refugees from Africa, Asia or the former Yugoslavia, and in a setting like Hjällboskolan, the sheer plurality of nationalities complicates the process of assimilation.
Still, facilitating cultural integration—while at the same time creating an environment that fosters diversity—is the stated goal of the school's administrators. Achieving that goal is a tricky process, especially since many Swedish students remain in their own academic cocoon, isolated from their non-native schoolmates. The 23 students in Yngve Blomfelt's Wednesday afternoon geography lesson, for example, are almost all native Swedes and all are from Olofstorp, a small village nestled in the countryside. Hjällboskolan's hallways may teem with diversity and the babel of foreign tongues, but none of this is evident inside Blomfelt's classroom.
Each morning these and other children from Olofstorp board a bus and make the 20-minute journey to Hjällbo, the immigrant enclave where the school is located. Despite their demographic dissimilarity, bucolic, middle-class Olofstorp and Hjällbo, which has the dubious distinction of being Sweden's poorest municipality, both fall under the administrative umbrella of the district of Lärjedalen for social services like education. Hjällboskolan is one of Lärjedalen's two public schools for children aged 13 to 16.
The gritty, multiethnic environment into which the Olofstorp students are delivered bears little resemblance to their pristine, predominantly Swedish village. But their interactions at Hjällboskolan are comfortingly familiar. The Olofstorp children remain together for most of their course of study, in core subjects like history and Swedish, and mix with other students only for secondary subjects like athletics.
At first glance, the semi-isolation of the Olofstorp contingent seems an indefensibly cynical attempt to insulate them from the ethnic and racial diversity that is increasingly the norm in Sweden. Ekenberg sees it differently. "We don't segregate. We have classes that are 50% immigrant and 50% Swedish," he insists. "We try to put them together as much as we can." He says the main reason the children from Olofstorp pursue most of their studies together is the school's policy of keeping incoming classes as intact as possible, regardless of where the students hail from. That is why Katarina, whose home is in Hammarkullen, an area in Lärjedalen where the balance between the immigrant and native populations is fairly evenly divided, has always studied alongside non-Swedish children.
Academic disparity between many of the immigrant and Swedish children further complicates the situation. Deputy headmaster Peter Holmqvist describes how vast the gulf can be, noting that some of the immigrants are refugees from war zones who are illiterate, even in their own language. "We have cases where newcomers arrive on the plane on Monday and on Wednesday they're here ready for school," he says. Placing children such as these in the same classes as the far more advanced students from Olofstorp is a practical impossibility.
But keeping the Olofstorp children together is also a pragmatic concession to their parents, who could opt to send them elsewhere. Although Hjällboskolan and the public school system to which it belongs were once the only real possibility for Olofstorp parents, a growing network of private schools—heavily subsidized by the government—now gives them a range of choices. Ekenberg estimates that a fifth of the children from Olofstorp attend private schools. "A surprisingly high percentage of immigrant parents also choose private schools," notes Lärjedalen official sten Carlson. "If you thought they are forced to choose [public school] because they don't know any better, it is simply not so." Interestingly, for immigrant parents the key criterion in selecting a private school is usually the quality of Swedish language instruction, a subject which they, like their Swedish counterparts, feel is compromised in a setting where the first language of most of the children is not the national one.
The practical advantages a school like Hjällboskolan has to offer can offset the attraction of private education. Though heavy immigration and rising unemployment have strained Sweden's tradition of openness, even in Olofstorp there is a recognition that, as Holmqvist says, ultimtately "you have to leave the village." Anders Olofsson, a resident of Olofstorp whose two sons attend Hjällboskolan, agrees. "Sooner or later you will meet the real world of how Sweden looks today," he says. "It's better if both the parents and the kids meet that reality earlier in life."
With a teenager's clear-eyed logic, Suman maintains that it is the parents who are least willing to confront that reality. "The children from Olofstorp don't have a bad attitude toward us; it's mostly the parents," she says. "They say that if the Swedish children don't form a joint class here, they will move them to another school." At the same time, she recognizes that the "Swedish" people are an integral part of Hjällboskolan. "You can't have a school with only immigrants," she explains, "because then the immigrants will be talking their own languages with each other and they won't develop the Swedish language."
The question is, can you have a school in Lärjedalen with no immigrants? Plans are under way for a new middle school in Olofstorp that would eliminate the need for the village children's daily journey to Hjällbo. If it is built, Hjällboskolan may become the exclusively immigrant domain Ekenberg and others have tried to avoid. Of course, if it is built, Hjällbo's immigrant parents can also decide that it offers the best option for their children. The day may come when the bus commute is reversed, and Hjällbo's immigrant children make a daily trek to the countryside.