kronisk

The benefit is that we can attract more people to come, live and work in Sweden.

This is a job that Swedish Girls Abroad™ is already excelling at. The amount of sob stories from british, australian and american expats lured here by some blond vixen one has had to sit through…

(Come to think of it, we should probably discourage people from coming here instead, it rarely ends well. Be advised: Sweden is cold, dark and no one past 25 wants to make new friends. Education and culture is regarded with suspicion. When swedes hear music, they clap on beats 1 and 3. The younger generations even pissed away their social safety net to a large extent, which basically was their only USP as a country. It’s a culture of bean counting engineers with emotional lives irrevocably damaged by protestantism; don’t come here, if you value your sanity.)

While I have myself hired people and told them they don’t need to learn Swedish to live in our society, they’ve come back and said that actually they felt they needed to when they had settled and had kids.

Great, so let’s make all Swedish speakers feel this way instead of your inconvenienced employees (because you gave them bad advice). Most swedes aren’t as fluent as they believe themselves to be and prefer to speak swedish in day to day situations. When you have kids, you can’t live in your own little bubble anymore.

Yes, I’m aware. I’m saying we should step it up and probably start earlier.

Thankfully this is a minority opinion and also mostly redundant, since most swedish people of working age speak and write English well enough for business purposes. There would be no benefit and a huge cultural heritage would be lost. Young swedish people need no extra motivation to learn english - they pick it up naturally from globalized media anyway, a lot faster than we can teach them.

The way the world is heading, it would be better to make German, French and Spanish mandatory in school instead.