This paper gives an overview of current forest education in Sweden and its historical development. In Sweden, education and research is dominated by one actor, the Faculty of Forest Sciences at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). In this paper, we discuss the values of a solid academic base, a close cooperation between research and development, and the best balance between theory and practise. We conclude that the overall challenge for Swedish Forest education, and indeed for comparable natural sciences programmes in other countries, is to widen the scope to include more social and humanistic aspects of forests and forestry. Management of “multifunctional forestry” best describes the vision we aim at. The change in syllabus, compared to current education, must of course differ among countries due to different forest and land use history and conditions. We wish to emphasize that in case of Sweden, a country where production forests are the economically most important natural resource, this recommendation is not a general shift of focus away from forest production. We do mean however, that the academics working in forestry must be equipped with sufficient knowledge about environmental issues and other functions of forests to be able to cope with future demands. We also wish to emphasise the international perspective of forestry. At the individual level students should be provided possibilities to take full master degrees (majors) in other subjects than Forest Management (e.g. Biology, Soil Science, Economics). We believe that there are some important requirements to keep higher education in Forest Sciences competitive and successful in the long term: a solid academic/ scientific base; a close association between research and teaching; and a mix of theory and practise/field studies. Forestry studies should be challenging to the students and provide them possibilities for personal development that enables them to meet unknown demands in the future.