In the year 2000 the leaders of the European Union launched the goal that the EU ought to become the most dynamic and competitive knowledge-based economy in the world by 2010. But, as we know today, this is not the case. At the opposite: Europe has lost ground over the last ten years. GDP has grown with less then 2 percent per year since the year 2000, and the employment rate in EU27 was already in 2008, before the economic crisis, a meagre 66 percent.

One reason behind our poor performance in Europe is that our education system isn’t working well enough. The performance of our educational system is on average with other industrialized countries, but we are losing ground. In addition there are important inequities within Europe, due to social, gender, economic and geographical background.

If we want to regain our competitive position, more investments in our people are needed. It should both be about volume, like more study places at higher education institutions and increased training for adults, and about quality, as a better organized primary education.

In “Making Europe Nobel Laureates in Education” Europe’s educational performances is studied in depth. The authors Pär Nuder, former Minister of Finance in Sweden, and Sebastian de Toro, Political advisor at the Swedish Social Democratic Parliamentary group, have visited 12 countries, organized seminars in 8 European cities and met numerous scholars, politicians, and representatives from business and NGOs. Researchers across Europe have been hired to write reports on different parts of the educational chain.

In total the authors present 46 proposals of how to improve Europe’s educational performance.