Relating to world culture theory, this article aimed to discern similarities and differences between the South Korean national curriculum (1981, 2015) and the Swedish national curriculum (1980, 2018) and a set of complementary documents, both more broadly and with special emphasis on middle school level mathematics education. The findings suggest…

This article addresses the ways in which Swedish history textbooks for upper secondary schools published between 1994 and 2011 deal with the most recent past. The textbooks are chronologically organized and follow history into the textbook authors' time, and each new edition of the textbooks includes the latest developments. The article inquires…

In Sweden, compulsory school grades determine admission to upper-secondary school. The article maps grading outcomes in compulsory school for 1990-2017, when three different grading scales were used, in terms of students' distribution across grading steps. Statistics of grades for all Swedish grade 9 students (all school subjects) are used.…

This article studies a sample of displaced workers during the deep 1990s recession in Sweden and estimates the effect of secondary-level adult education on tertiary-level educational attainment. Plant closures and mass layoffs are used to identify job separations unrelated to individual productivity. Results indicate a large positive effect of…

This article explores representations of problems regarding citizenship in changes to the syllabi of social studies and history in Swedish secondary schools between 1970 and 2017. Previous research has shown that the general educational discourse changed from an emphasis on the societal needs of committed citizens to an emphasis on the…

This article analyses international large-scale assessments in education from a temporal perspective. The article discusses and compares the different conceptions of time in the early international assessments conducted in the 1960s and 1970s by the IEA with the PISA studies conducted by the OECD from the year 2000 onwards. The paper argues that…

Political reforms of the 1990s ushered in sweeping socio-economic changes in the Nordic countries, including radical changes in their vocational education and training systems. However, the reforms led to a school-based vocational education and training system with a strong orientation towards higher education in Sweden, and a hybrid system with a…

In Sweden, adequate digital competence has been put in the spotlight due to the Swedish 2017 national strategy for the digitalisation of the K-12 school system. Based on both policy and practice, the aim is to explore teachers' enacted digital competence in three upper secondary schools in Sweden and thereby provide an empirical account of what…

This article is the first of four articles exploring democratic schools co-founded by teenage students in Norway and Sweden. Our larger project explores the relationship between democracy in education and educational dialogism. Both democracy in education and educational dialogism are partially rooted in the idea that education should be a…

Educational equality has been a central tenet framing educational policy in Nordic welfare states and stimulating school reforms in the 1960s and 1970s. However, the conceptualisation of equality has fluctuated, reflecting the changing economic and political climate within which policy statements have been made. In this article, we analyse policy…

The aim of the article is to deepen the knowledge of progressivism and how it was manifested in practice in Swedish secondary schools from a teacher perspective before it was prescribed in policy during the reforms of the 1950s. In the current educational debate, progressivism is blamed by some for being the root of a permissive style of education…

This article analyses and compares the evolving role of general subjects in the curricula of initial upper secondary vocational education and training (VET) in Finland and Sweden during the 1990s and 2010s. The research illustrates how Bernstein's concept of 'pedagogic code' supports comparative studies on principles guiding changes to curricula…

This study examines how Swedish students originating from metropolitan areas have used university colleges to access higher education. In the 1970s, as part of a series of reforms to the Swedish higher education system, university colleges were established. One reason being to make higher education more accessible to students outside the…

In a radical school choice reform in 1992, Sweden's education system was opened to private competition from independent for-profit and non-profit schools funded by vouchers. Competition was expected to produce higher-quality education at lower cost, in both independent and public schools. This two-pronged study first examines to what extent the…

This article focuses on the Swedish context of upper and post-upper secondary education provided in two sectors, universities and the Swedish Folk High School. The article is centred on the analysis of the support services offered by fifty-five university and Swedish Folk High School institutional websites to individuals and groups designated as…