An extreme form of high culture. That’s what Swedish author and journalist Jan Guillou calls boarding schools. He goes further to suggest they should all be closed. “They shouldn’t be financed with money from the taxpayers,” he says. Guillou himself went to boarding school (“internatskolor”), and his book “Ondskan” (“Evil”) is about life at Solbacka, the school he attended. In it, Guillou brings up the bullying that he himself experienced as a student there. He says he recognizes the pattern in the recent report about bullying from a student at a school in Sigtuna. Says Guillou: “It’s a physically milder form, but the humiliation is the same. It is just as bad today going through these sorts of initiation rituals as in the days when it was worse physically.” Guillou believes there ought to exist a national boarding school for students from other countries. He's against the boarding school for the Swedish upper class and suggests that two national boarding schools close down immediately. “This is an extreme form of high culture that belongs to the 19th century and which we shouldn’t finance with taxpayer’s money,” he says. “The Minister for Education can with only one stroke of the pen close these schools. It won’t cost a dime and he won’t lose any votes.” Guillou adds that he feels the boy who reported the systematical violence at Sigtuna is brave: “He’s made himself socially impossible at the school. He will be defamed for the rest of his life. Whatever social benefits there may be to study at an upper class school – he’s lost them all. There’s a price to pay for those who report crime.”