Innehåll
That is a strange thing to say about the place where you grew up. For most of my life, Sweden was simply the operating system. You do not normally notice an operating system while you are living inside it. Its assumptions feel like reality itself: children go to school, the state defines the framework, institutions are trusted, and the boundaries around family life are rarely questioned because almost everyone around you accepts roughly the same boundaries.
Then you leave.
Spend enough years somewhere else and things that once seemed completely normal begin to look remarkably peculiar. Other things that used to make you furious lose their emotional charge. Distance changes the picture. Eleven years have passed since we left Sweden permanently, and my memory of the country has begun to blur around the edges.
That is one reason I am grateful this blog still exists. It contains an earlier version of me, writing while we were still inside the problem: before hindsight had tidied everything into a coherent story, while the questions were new, the frustration was fresh and we were trying to understand why something that seemed so obvious to us could be so extraordinarily difficult to do in Sweden.
Eleven years later, I think I understand the story much better. It was never really about school. It was about exit.
We had found home
In 2012, with a two-year-old and a baby, we moved into an old wooden house in the Swedish countryside.
It had once been a cinema. Artists had lived there. It was eccentric, full of strange rooms and possibilities, with space for children, projects and ideas. We had lovely neighbours and beautiful countryside nearby. It was not a temporary stop or somewhere we moved while planning our next adventure.
It was the sort of house you imagine growing old in. That matters, because the story can otherwise sound as though we were restless people looking for an excuse to travel. We were not. We had found a home, and we had very strong reasons to stay.
Then parenthood made us notice things that had previously been almost invisible.
Parenthood makes the operating system visible
Before having children, I had never seriously questioned the Swedish educational system. School was school. Children went there. The state wrote the curriculum. Everyone around me lived inside roughly the same structure.
Then I became a parent. Suddenly the question was no longer whether I had survived school reasonably well. The question was whether this particular system was right for the actual children standing in front of me.
Children have an inconvenient habit of not following adult specifications. One may need enormous amounts of movement. Another silence. One wants structure. Another learns in intense bursts of curiosity. A child may be years ahead in one area and completely ordinary in another. Highly gifted children in particular make the absurdity of age-standardisation rather difficult to ignore.
At first, naturally, you try to make the system work. Could the school adapt? Could the child work at another level? Was there another school? Montessori? Waldorf? A private option?
Eventually we discovered the boundary.
Sweden was willing to discuss how the system might adapt itself to our children.
What it was not willing to accept was our right to reject the system itself.
That is a completely different thing.
Choice inside the system is not the same as exit
Sweden likes to talk about school choice.
Parents can choose between municipal schools and friskolor. The latter are often translated into English as “independent schools”, which gives foreign readers rather the wrong impression. They may have private operators and different profiles, but they remain inside the Swedish educational framework. Compulsory education is publicly funded, schools are regulated within the national system, and families cannot simply choose an entirely separate educational jurisdiction.
You can choose the interface.
You cannot choose the protocol.
And homeschooling is not a legal educational alternative.
A family cannot simply say:
Thank you. This framework does not suit our child. We will take responsibility for educating them in another way.
That option does not exist.
This was where I began to understand the difference between being offered choices inside a system and possessing a genuine right of exit from it.
To anyone with an instinct for freedom, the distinction should be familiar. A decentralised system is not one that presents several approved buttons on the same control panel. It is one in which leaving the system is possible.
A “right” you may not refuse
When we questioned compulsory schooling, one argument came back repeatedly:
But the child has a right to go to school.
It sounds compassionate. Who could possibly oppose a child’s right to education?
Certainly not me.
But a right and an obligation are not the same thing.
A genuine right protects access. The moment refusal is prohibited, something else has entered the equation.
A right you are not allowed to refuse is an obligation.
My problem has never been with guaranteeing access to education. It is with using the language of rights to obscure the coercive part of the arrangement.
A right opens a door.
An obligation tells you that you must walk through it.
Sweden offered us several doors inside the same building.
It did not offer an exit.
And then there is the värdegrund
Foreign readers also need an explanation of a very Swedish word: värdegrund.
It is normally translated into English with harmless-sounding expressions such as “fundamental values”. That does not quite capture its cultural meaning. It is closer to a normative framework: values, norms and ideas about what sort of society, and to some extent what sort of citizen, educational institutions are expected to promote.
This begins already in preschool.
The particular values are not even the most important part of my objection. You may agree with all of them.
The more interesting question is:
Who gets to decide?
If a school voluntarily offers a particular philosophy and families voluntarily choose it, wonderful. If the state defines the normative framework and simultaneously prevents meaningful educational exit, we are dealing with something else.
The issue is no longer merely education.
It is authority.
This was not a bug
For a while I thought this rigidity was simply bad policy: an unfortunate law, a bureaucratic relic, something that would eventually be liberalised.
Then I began reading more Swedish history.
Modern Sweden developed an unusually strong confidence that society could be consciously designed. Not merely roads, housing and welfare systems, but families, childhood and social behaviour could be improved through planning, expertise and institutions.
The idea of folkhemmet — “the people’s home” — became one of the defining metaphors of twentieth-century Sweden. Society itself was imagined as a common home that could be rationally organised for the benefit of all.
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal became enormously influential within this tradition. Family policy, childcare and the upbringing of future citizens were no longer understood as entirely private matters. Childhood increasingly became part of the project of building society.
Once you understand that history, some features of modern Sweden make much more sense. Värdegrund is not an accidental addition. Compulsory participation is not an accidental addition. The idea that the collective has a legitimate interest in how children are formed is not an accidental addition.
This was not a bug. It was the design.
And perhaps the most effective form of social engineering is the kind nobody experiences as engineering any longer.
It simply feels normal.
I was never anti-school
This distinction matters because it has repeatedly been distorted in media coverage of our family.
For more than a decade I have been consistent about the same point: my objection is not to the existence of schools. My objection is to compulsory schooling without a meaningful right of exit.
I said this before we left Sweden. I said it in interviews. I said it in a video later published by the Daily Mail. I said it to Swedish journalists years afterwards.
Yet the story repeatedly emerged in a much simpler and more dramatic form: a family that “rejects school”, a mother who “refuses to let her children attend Swedish school”, and eventually Expressen’s wonderfully theatrical description of a new “anti-school movement”.
The irony is that the actual argument was often sitting there inside the same coverage. I repeatedly explained that the decisive problem was skolplikt — compulsory school attendance. Somehow opposition to compulsion was repackaged as opposition to education itself.
Those are not the same thing.
I am perfectly happy for schools to exist. I am happy for families to choose state schools, private schools, Montessori schools, highly academic schools, democratic schools or anything else that works for their children. Some of our own children have attended schools, and some have thrived in them.
What I oppose is monopoly. There is an enormous moral difference between: “Here is a school. We think it is excellent. You are free to choose it.” and: “Here is the educational framework your child must enter. You may choose between several approved versions of it, but you may not refuse the framework itself.”
The first is an offer. The second is compulsion.
Describing unschooling as “anti-school” is rather like describing open-source software as “anti-software”. The point is not that nobody should use the incumbent system. The point is that nobody should be forced to. The coercion only runs in one direction.
If Sweden legalised homeschooling and genuinely independent educational alternatives tomorrow, I would have no interest whatsoever in forcing a single Swedish family to use them. That is the entire point.
I do not want my model to replace the state’s model. I want families to be allowed to choose between models. If I demanded that every child unschool, I would merely construct another compulsory mould — Caroline’s mould instead of Sweden’s.
I was never anti-school. I was anti-monopoly. And I still am.
The rock
Of course we tried to find a way to remain in Sweden. You do not abandon a home, family, friends and an entire country because of a theoretical disagreement. But eventually we understood that we were not confronting one unpopular rule that everybody secretly wanted changed. The law pointed one way. The institutions pointed the same way. Much of the surrounding culture did too.
It began to look less like a policy dispute and more like a rock. You can argue with a rock. Write articles about it. Explain that your child is different. Point out that other countries do things another way. The rock remains where it is.
And children have only one childhood. We could spend that childhood trying to persuade Sweden to change. Or we could go around the rock.
Jurisdiction changes everything
That was the psychological breakthrough. Previously there had been Sweden and “abroad”. Now there were jurisdictions. Different laws. Different cultures. Different assumptions about parents, children, education and state authority. The question changed from:
How do we persuade Sweden to let us live this way? to: Where can we already live this way?
That is an extraordinarily liberating question. You stop treating the country where you happened to be born as the natural centre of the universe. It becomes one jurisdiction among many. If the protocol does not permit exit, sometimes you exit the protocol by changing jurisdiction. In February 2015, that is what we did.
We left Sweden.
Sweden’s final goodbye
Leaving was not particularly glamorous. It was winter. Dark, snowy and bitterly cold. My grandmother had just passed away, and on the very day we were due to leave, someone smashed the windows of our car. It was difficult to imagine a more miserable farewell.
Children. Luggage. Broken glass. Sub-zero temperatures. A ferry to catch. Sweden apparently wanted the last word.
So we went. We could not opt out of the educational system. We opted out of the jurisdiction.
The world became the classroom
Then something extraordinary happened. The world opened.
During roughly the first year and a half, we travelled through around forty countries, often staying for weeks or a month or two rather than simply passing through. We were searching for freedom, certainly, but also for people: homeschoolers, unschoolers, families who thought differently about childhood, communities where people were building lives outside the standard model, and somewhere we might eventually put down roots.
While we were searching, the world itself became the classroom. Geography was where we were standing. Languages were how we bought food and made friends. History surrounded us.
This is usually called worldschooling, although the label matters less to me than the experience. Once you stop assuming learning must be delivered through one institution, the possible learning environment becomes enormous.
Education is wonderfully non-binary
Leaving Sweden also destroyed another assumption. The choice is not: school or no education.
There are state schools, genuinely independent private schools, structured homeschooling, unschooling, worldschooling, democratic schools, community schools, co-operatives and learning groups. Here in Czech Republic you can find svobodné školy, komunitní školy and educational communities that sit somewhere between conventional school and home education.
Education is wonderfully non-binary. Once you stop forcing it into a binary model, an ecosystem appears. That is what decentralisation does. It does not produce the alternative. It allows many alternatives to emerge.
Freedom has a workload
There is, however, a part of freedom that libertarians sometimes romanticise. Responsibility. The more you take back, the more you carry.
A private school outsources a great deal: teachers, timetable, peer group, activities, structure and much of the evaluation. Structured homeschooling takes more responsibility back while perhaps retaining a curriculum and external benchmarks.
Unschooling moves much more of that responsibility to the family.
Our two oldest children were unschooled until roughly the age of twelve, and unschooling was certainly not passive parenting. Quite the opposite. You observe, provide resources, find people, arrange activities, organise friendships, start projects, follow interests and introduce things a child cannot yet know enough about to ask for. You also have to know when to motivate, when to help and when to get out of the way.
And you have to evaluate your own decisions. Sometimes the most important question is: Am I wrong? Freedom does not guarantee better decisions. It gives you the right to make decisions — and the responsibility to recognise when you have made a bad one. Outsourcing is not the enemy. Having no choice about what you outsource is.
The goal is not obedience
There is another reason this matters to me. Education is not simply the transfer of information. It also shapes a person’s relationship with authority. Children learn enormously from what adults actually do. How we work. How we treat people. Whether we apologise. Whether we admit mistakes. Whether we automatically obey or think first.
Parents are part of the curriculum whether we intend to be or not. My goal is not to produce children who obediently reproduce my worldview. That would be a rather ironic conclusion to a story about escaping social engineering. I want children capable of thinking for themselves: children who can question the state, question the crowd and question us.
If one of my children grows up and profoundly disagrees with me, that is not necessarily evidence that I failed. It may be evidence that I succeeded.
Movement is not the same thing as home
For a while travelling felt like pure freedom. New countries. New people. New possibilities.
We travelled relatively slowly, often staying long enough to develop routines and friendships. But temporary life remains temporary. Eventually you know you are leaving again. Communities disappear behind you. Activities end just as children become invested in them.
After a while, ordinary life starts to look rather attractive. A kitchen table. Friends who will still be nearby next month. Projects that can continue next Tuesday. We had discovered the freedom to leave. Now we needed the freedom to stay.
The map is not the territory
During those years we also became interested in more ambitious attempts to build freer jurisdictions, including Liberland. We once tried to visit with Vít Jedlička himself, which became especially memorable when Croatian border police stopped us after discovering that his luggage contained Bitcoin ATMs and stacks of Liberland flyers.
Apparently arriving at a disputed border with the president of a micronation and equipment for an alternative financial system does attract attention. After around three hours, with two increasingly thirsty and hungry children and no successful border crossing, we gave up for the day. In retrospect it was a perfect lesson: the map is not the territory.
A family needs something that works on Monday morning: a home, friends, work, healthcare, infrastructure, community and genuine educational possibilities.
So I gradually stopped asking:
Where is the perfectly free society?
and started asking:
Where can we live the freest life available to us in the real world?
That question eventually brought us to Prague.
Freedom inside an unfree world
Czech republic is not a libertarian utopia. It has taxes, bureaucracy and plenty of rules I would happily delete.
But it gave us something much more useful than ideological purity.
Practical freedom. Homeschooling is possible. Alternative educational communities exist. Private schools can provide genuinely different experiences. Families have more room to organise their lives differently.
We found friends, community and continuity. We stopped looking for perfection.
There is an irony I still appreciate. We left Sweden — a country widely seen as exceptionally free — and found that, in some parts of family life, Czech Repuclic gave us more room to make our own choices. Perhaps the difference is partly cultural: people here tend to have a more cautious relationship with state authority, and that can leave a little more space for families to do things differently.
Exile as exit
Exile sounds dramatic. We were not political refugees crossing mountains under gunfire. But the word still describes something real. We left our country because the state claimed authority over something we regarded as fundamentally ours to decide, and it offered no meaningful opt-out.
People sometimes ask why we did not stay and change Sweden. Because children grow up. Political movements can take decades. A six-year-old becomes sixteen while adults are still holding meetings, writing reports and arguing about reform. Time matters when what is being spent cannot be restored later.
You cannot print another childhood.
Sometimes the rational response is not to spend your life trying to move the rock. Sometimes you go around it.
Den andra resan
The name of this blog has two meanings that disappear in English.
Den andra resan means The Second Journey — the second great journey of my life, beginning with becoming a parent. But andra also means the other. So it is also The Other Journey.
The alternative route. Doing things differently. Refusing the default simply because it is the default. That meaning has become more accurate with time. The children have grown. We now have four of them. Our methods have changed. We no longer live permanently out of suitcases. Different children have needed different things at different ages.
But the principle underneath it has not changed: You may offer me your system. You may not forbid me to refuse it.
Freedom is a generational project
Eleven years later, I think this has become the most important part of the story. People in freedom circles spend enormous amounts of energy thinking about sovereignty: better money, encryption, privacy, parallel institutions, new jurisdictions and better ways to opt out.
All of that matters. But every freedom movement has a succession problem. Who comes next?
We can build the tools of freedom and still lose the culture that understands what those tools are for. Free societies require people capable of being free: people who can think, question, choose, co-operate voluntarily, accept responsibility and know when to walk away from systems that cannot be changed.
That is why parenting and education belong in the freedom conversation. It is not only a job for parents. Everyone who builds technology, institutions, communities and culture helps determine what the next generation inherits.
Time is the genuinely scarce asset. Money can be earned again. Institutions can be rebuilt. Laws can be rewritten. A life, once spent, cannot be recovered. And a child cannot be given their childhood back. So build the technology. Build the parallel institutions.
Build the freer jurisdictions. Build the communities.
But do not wait for the perfect future before you start living freely now. Because the future is not somewhere we eventually arrive.
We are building it now. And then we hand it on. Build freedom that outlives you.
