Since WWII, Sweden has had an international reputation for being modern and progressive, with schooling that provides equal opportunities for all children. Analysing local enactment of the national pursuit of modernisation in two contrasting municipalities, this paper offers new perspectives on Swedish education history beyond the image of…

There are many similarities between the Nordic countries of Sweden and Finland, but they have made different decisions regarding their teacher-education policies. This article focuses on how the objectives of teacher education, particularly the vision of the ideal teacher, have changed in Sweden and Finland in the period after the Second World…

The aim of this article is to convey the history, practices and central discourses of film education in Sweden. The first part takes the pioneering efforts, dating back to 1908, as a starting point for describing the development of nationwide school cinema, financed by public funding and coordinated by the Swedish Film Institute. As I will argue,…

During the twentieth century, an increasing amount of data was collected in connection with engineering of the modern states including their education systems. In the Nordic welfare states post WW2, such data were also generated in experimental projects aiming at reforming curriculum and education, and the data were accumulated either as…

This paper gives an account of the history of foreign language values in Sweden from the seventeenth century to the present. The paper is informed by sociocultural standpoints on language and language learning according to which language is a dynamic tool that is appropriated by individuals to achieve particular purposes, and that dialogically…

This article explores how the development of mother-tongue instruction (MTI) policies in the Danish welfare state have created varying notions of difference and sameness in the schooling of migrant students and how they experience these notions locally in practice. Based on an analysis of MTI's policy history and oral history interviews with…

This comparative curricular study examines the educational functions of the Swedish Sámi nomad school curricula before and after a central school reform in the 1960s. Due to the reform, the nomad school, a boarding school system for the Indigenous Sámi people in Sweden, was formed to bring about systemic changes in the education of Sámi children,…

In Europe, there are many different ways in which early childhood education and care professionals are trained. This article investigates how these different forms came into being. Comparing two small, prosperous European countries, Sweden and Switzerland, we analyse the developments in training regimes for early childhood professionals since the…

The following article examines the emerging historical legitimacy of specialised comprehensive schools in Sweden. During the 1980s, neoliberal ideas were gaining ground in Swedish educational policy. As a result, the social democratic government began to relax the rigour of the unified, state-regulated educational system. Specialised music classes…

This article examines challenges to the classical paradigm of education in Sweden that followed in the wake of state-initiated attempts at school reform in the first decades of the nineteenth century. When the internal disputes of the so-called 'Genius Committee' resulted in a failure to overcome the increasing divide between reformers, a prolific…

In this article, we direct our focus on some of the recent activities undertaken by popular education institutions in Sweden in relation to the refugee challenge in 2015. The aim is to analyse how these popular education activities are shaped as specific communities of practice, through the ways they are described by those who organised these, and…

The aim of this article is, in a chronological perspective, to identify, discuss and problematise concepts for children's 'problems' in compulsory school and the contexts in which they have been categorised and used. To clarify the categorisation in context, the article is based on a previous study on categorisation in Swedish youth education from…

The aim of this article is to illuminate and discuss evaluation and evaluation systems in relation to the pace of change. It is argued that evaluation promotes and accelerates change. The article will thus contribute to a critical scrutiny of evaluation as a societal phenomenon and as a widespread practice in education. To accomplish this aim, the…

For more than 40 years, health and physical education (HPE) academics in universities and teacher education colleges have drawn attention to issues of social justice specific to the context of PE and advocated for teachers in fields, gymnasiums and other physical activity spaces to do a better job of promoting more equitable outcomes for all…

This article aims to analyse how the emerging Swedish school system in the early nineteenth century can be understood within the context of a gradual break-up of the estate society and its replacement with a class society in which citizenship was an important foundation. This is done through the discussion of the conceptions of citizenship on two…