Sweden is the most pro-feminist country in the world, so it’s not surprising that they get more of what they pay for. I suspect Swedish schools are suffering from an unintended but malign interaction of First World feminism and Third World male supremacy.

In the First World, male supremacy is defined in practice as men achieving more than women, so much effort is made to Close the Gap. The easiest way, of course, is to discourage males from achieving so much. Boys wasting time on video games is less a problem than a solution for the pressing problem of Male Supremacy.

In contrast, in much of the Third World, especially Islamic and African cultures, male supremacy means women doing most of the work. So, when males from these kind of cultures grow up in a First World culture obsessed with keeping men from out-achieving women, and with not criticizing Third World cultures, well, there’s a handy win-win solution: the males just slack off even more.

Don’t overlook interaction effects: as identifiable and under-performing minorities take up ever more space in the brain of the educational establishment, Closing the Gap tends to become an obsession, which can mean that investing in high achievers becomes politically suspect. For example, after Sputnik in 1957, the U.S. focused for a number of years on finding diamonds in the rough and on mobilizing the talents of the talented. But with the black equality becoming the highest value in the land and shocking realization that there weren’t many black diamonds in the rough, standards plunged across the board in the Jeff Spicoli Era of American education in the 1970s