The domination and exploitation of working class values, identities and labour-power in Sweden’s comprehensive school extension and neo-liberal market reforms

ABSTRACT

Questions about Sweden’s education system often consider the extent to which educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 contributed to social justice, equity and equality, and the extent to which neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards have reversed this tendency. Using Young’s model of structural injustice, Wodak’s critical discourse analysis, and a historical materialist research outcomes analysis relating to investigations of education justice, equity and equality, the present article explores this possibility. It suggests three things. 1. From a materialist perspective on class-history, social democratic reforms from 1940 increased system capacity and retention and created a well-resourced and extended comprehensive school system with a shared curriculum for all pupils up to age 16, except for those with serious intellectual and physical difficulties. 2. However, these reforms failed to generate educational justice, equity or equality. Contributing to modernisation, economic growth and the stabilisation of capitalist production relations were far clearer aims and were also attained. 3. Neoliberal reforms after 1990 led to decreased relative education equity, but they did not create inequality and injustice, nor remove statements about equality aims. They did however change their discursive associations and realisation possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Capitalist class inequality
• education politics
• labour power
• market reform

Introduction

In two reports about education quality and equity changes, Sweden’s 2015 School Commission (SOU 2016:38, 2017:35) identified two eras in the socio-economic history of education politics as important. The first was a period of expansion of centrally governed comprehensive schooling from the 1940s to the 1980s. The second was a period of decentralisation and devolution of governance from 1990, followed by the introduction of neoliberal market politics (Andersson & Nilsson, 2000; Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006) and the re-emergence of a parallel school system (Dovemark et al., 2018; Lundahl, 2002, 2016). Both periods began experimentally, as a response to prevailing social and economic conditions (Dovemark, 2004; Lundahl et al., 2013, 2014), and the two reports allude to them having had opposing effects on educational justice and equity, which expanded in the first period and contracted in the second. These asserted differences are in focus, but also contested, in the present article.

The article challenges the claims in the following way. It accepts that education outcomes since the 1990 reforms have been very disappointing from the perspectives of justice, quality and equality, but not that these reforms caused inequality, or that there were strong political contrasts across the two reform periods. An analysis of key educational political texts and research findings would show this if it was true, but so far the exceptionalism attributed to Sweden’s educational equity and its subsequent demise lacks convincing scientific support (Beach, 2018). First of all, the first period did not result in significant (if any) improvements in education equity (Gesser, 1976; Jonsson, 1993) or other social justice indexes (Lindbeck, 1997; Therborn et al., 1978), so neoliberal reform could therefore not destroy them (Börjesson, 2016). Secondly, the expansion of centrally governed comprehensive schooling that took place between 1940 and 1980, actually began earlier, with what the 1918 School Commission called the “parallel school system”, based on Fridtjuv Berg’s (1859–1916) concept of a common elementary school as a foundation for further studies or work (Richardsson, 1983).

Berg’s idea involved a common six-year foundation in state elementary schools for all pupils, followed by continuation studies in either the elementary school sector, or in boys- and girls-grammar schools, from year-seven. This was anticipated to have class-equalising effects by Berg, but these effects were extremely small in practice. Indeed they were negligible according to later national inquiries, such as the government appointed 1940 School Commission (SOU 1944:20–22, 1945: 60), which identified a premature differentiation of pupils in the parallel school system (in year four compared to Berg’s suggestion of year-7) as the main problem. According to the 1940-commission, early differentiation removed the possibility for cooperation around the learning of late-developers and, similarly to the tripartite education system that had emerged in England, reflected the desires of trade and industry for a segmental preparation of a qualified labour-force, rather than the needs of a common nation. What the optimal length of common studies might be was uncertain, and a new commission was charged in 1946 with re-evaluating the earlier reports and exploring possibilities for extending the common educational foundation (Husén, 1956; Richardsson, 1983). It submitted its first report already in 1948 (SOU 1948: 27).

The 1946-commission report recommended six years of undifferentiated schooling as standard, along with a school experiment for testing delayed differentiation to nine years in selected school districts. The experiment began in 1949/1950 (Prop. 1950:70) and was about testing the effects of access to a common academic curriculum for all pupils in upper age-grades (6–9), based on grammar school standards, but through modern teaching in a school that acted as a mirror and mediator of society’s social values (SOU 1948: 27). The importance of socialisation for free personalities in a modern democracy built on non-authoritarian schooling and progressive methods to produce a free thinking population of independent citizens, for whom cooperation was a need and a joy, were emphasised (SOU 1948: 27 p. 3–4). Social/civic studies and the importance of good physical and mental health and development were too, but the cornerstone of reform was still the issue of access to a grammar school curriculum and an educational turn towards an Anglo-American influence and a concept of meritocracy that opened-up selections into upper-secondary academic study tracks and subsequently university entrance based on demonstrated ability, rather than on a pupil’s birthplace, gender, or parental occupation (Husén, 1956; Richardsson, 1983).

The domination of the upper-grade (7–9) curriculum by (boys) grammar school content and values and the possible effects this could have on pupil-learning was not given any critical attention in the commission reports, except in terms of the possible risks of glass-ceiling effects, where the higher up in the hierarchy of qualifications and levels of education one looked, the lower the level of representation of people of working class and rural backgrounds (Powell, 2016). Meritocracy theory held assumptions (that were actually already implicit in Berg’s foundation school idea) that objective evaluations were possible to make regardless of gender, class, race and sexuality, and that everyone could be given the same opportunities to advance because of this, provided they were hardworking and intelligent and measurements of their achievements were free from bias (Husén, 1956). Scientifically established analytically grounded facts then and later suggested however that such assumptions were quite false (Powell, 2016), and thus that the comprehensive school extension project was strongly ideological from the outset (Liedman, 2011), with highly uncertain outcomes, beyond those of extending school infrastructure and extending the number of years young people spent in school.

Analytical focus and method

Based on Wodak’s (2011) notion of political texts as semiotic data that can reveal the presence and effects of hegemony and asymmetric power relations behind and influencing both the aims, content, means, motivations and anticipated outcomes of political directives, reports, and proposition texts, the present article identifies and analyses Green and White Papers for the two investigated periods (i.e. 1940–1980s and 1990 onwards) and compares the findings with research about school outcomes. This research has included publications by Erikson and Jonsson (1996, 1998), Husén (1956), Jonsson (1993), Liedman (2011), Lundberg et al. (1976, 1987), Therborn (1986), and Therborn et al. (1978), and contributions there, such as those of Gesser (1976) and Lundgren (1976). They principally address the first period of reform from the 1940s to the 1980s. The list of analysed Green and White Paper texts is presented in Table 1.

Table 1. Analysed Green and White Papers

Paper	Title
Prop. 1950:70	Kungliga majoritets proposition till riksdagen angående riktlinjer för det svenska skolväsendets utveckling
Prop. 1962:54	Kungl. Maj:ts proposition till riksdagen angående reformering av den obligatoriska skolan m.m.
Prop. 1964:171	Angående reformeringen av de gymnasiala skolorna m.m.
Prop. 1968:140	Angående riktlinjer för det frivilliga skolväsendet
Prop. 1975/76:39	Om skolans inre arbete m.m
Prop. 1976/77: 5	Regeringens proposition om reformering av högskoleutbildningen
Prop. 1983/84:116	Om gymnasieskola i utveckling
Prop. 1988/89:4	Om skolans utveckling och styrning
Prop. 1989/90:41	Om kommunalt huvudmannaskap för lärare, skolledare, biträdande skolledare och syofunktionärer
Prop. 1990/91:18	Skolans ansvar och styrning
Prop. 1990/91: 85	Växa med kunskap
Prop. 1991/92:95	Om valfrihet och fristående skolor
Prop. 1992/93:230	Valfrihet i skolan
Prop. 1995/96:200	Fristående skolor m.m.
Prop. 2017/18:182	Samling för skolan
SOU 1944:20–22	1940 års skolutrednings betänkanden och utredningar I–III
SOU 1945:60	1940 års skolutrednings betänkanden och utredningar (IV)
SOU 1948: 27	Skolkommissionens betänkande med förslag till riktlinjer för det Svenska skolväsendets utveckling
SOU 1961: 30–31	Grundskolan: Betänkande avgivit av 1957 Skolberedning
SOU 1963:41	Specialutredningar om gymnasiet
SOU 1963:42	Et nytt gymnasium
SOU 1963:43	Läroplan för gymnasiet
SOU 1965:11	Utbyggnaden av universitet och högskolor Del I
SOU 1965:12	Utbyggnaden av universitet och högskolor Del II
SOU 1974:36	Skolan, staten och kommunerna
SOU 1974:53	Skolans arbetsmiljö
SOU 1978:65	Skolan. En ändrad ansvarsfördelning. Slutbetänkande av utredningen om skolan staten och kommunerna
SOU 1981:96	En reformerad gymnasieskola
SOU 1984:83	Folkstyret i kommunerna: Medverkan – Delaktighet – Ansvar. Diskussionsbetänkande från 1983 år demokratiberedning
SOU 1984:84	Lokalt folkstyre genom brukarmedverkan: Exempel och erfarenheter
SOU 1985:30	Skola för delaktighet
SOU 1988:20	En förändrad ansvarsfördelning och styrning på skolområdet
SOU 1990:44	Demokrati och makt i Sverige: Maktutredningens huvudrapport
SOU 1992:94	Skola för bildning
SOU 1993:16	Nya villkor för ekonomi och politik
SOU 1994:101	Höj Ribban
SOU 1996:1	Den nya gymnasieskolan – hur går det?
SOU 1997:24	Välfärd i verkligheten pengarna räcker inte
SOU 2008:27	Framtidsvägen – en reformerad gymnasieskola
SOU 2016:38	Samling för skolan. Nationella målsättningar och utvecklingsområden för kunskap och likvärdighet
SOU 2017: 35	Samling för skolan-Nationell strategi för kunskap och likvärdighet

Two different blocks of publications provided foundations for the research analysis for the second period (1990 onwards). The first block comprised ethnographic and meta-ethnographic articles by Beach (2010, 2017a, 2017b), Beach et al. (2013, 2019), and Beach and Puaca (2014), Beach and Sernhede (2011, 2012), Beach and Vigo (2020), Dovemark and Beach (2015, 2016), Erlandson and Beach (2014) and Jonsson and Beach (2015), and chapters from books edited by Beach et al. (2003), Gudmundsson et al. (2013), Öhrn and Beach (2019), and Öhrn et al. (2011). The second block comprised research mainly for triangulation processes. It included all chapters in Blossing et al. (2014: Eds) and Fejes and Dahlstedt (2019: Eds), articles by Andersson and Nilsson (2000), Arnesen and Lundahl (2006), Bunar (2010), Dovemark et al. (2018), Lindbeck (1997), Lundahl (2002), and Lundahl et al. (2013) and Yang Hansen and Gustafsson (2019) and books by Börjesson (2016), Dovemark (2004), Haley (2017); Fjellman (2019), Lundahl et al. (2014), Nordänger (2002), and Young’s (2004) five faces of oppression model informed all phases of the analysis. This model describes injustice in terms of the exploitation of workers and the wealth they generate, marginalisation, powerlessness and cultural dominance through the experiences, expressions and history of one group being defined as superior to others, and the use of violence (including symbolic forms) to enforce/enhance this domination. It contributes to the historical materialist theoretical foundations for the study, which excludes adult and preschool education, as they were not significantly institutionalised within the education sector before the 1970s and 1990s respectively.

Results

The results refer to education politics and outcomes across the two investigated periods. They relate to the extension and contradictions of state comprehensive education reform; and uncertainty and the establishment of education market reforms respectively.

The extension and contradictions of comprehensive education: 1940 to 1990

The 1946 School Commission Report (SOU 1948:27) marks a foundational moment for the first reform period in which an infrastructure of undifferentiated schooling was extended in stages, following the report’s recommendations (Richardsson, 1983). The first extension was from three to six years. The second, from six to nine years, began experimentally in 1950 for children from 7 to 16 years old, and became universal and permanent, between 1964 and the academic year 1972/73. An integrated upper secondary school extended the single system afterwards, to include young people up to 19-years old in the 1970s. Higher education expansion, beginning in the 1960s, and integration in 1977, added a growing but diverse tertiary sector.

The 1946 commission followed an earlier investigation from 1940 for broadening academic grammar school recruitment, and that had produced several reports recommending moderate changes to the existing school system (SOU 1944:20–22, 1945: 60). However, considering the consequences of fascism during the Second World War (1939–45) and threats of social polarisation both before and after, the then first single social democratic government (elected in 1944) had hoped for more extensive suggestions and appointed a new commission, comprising politicians together with an advisory group of educators and education researchers to these ends (Richardsson, 1983). Its directives were to examine the earlier reports and consider how to create a common school system to produce democratic citizens able to resist extremist forces (Liedman, 2011; SOU 1948:27). The committee recommended a school experiment to test a nine-year common school (enhetsskola) in comparison with the six year foundation school followed by parallel classes, as recommended by the earlier commission. The recommendations obtained broad political support and the experiment was later evaluated, after which parliament passed a new Bill (Prop. 1962:54) in 1962, to permanently establish a common undifferentiated national comprehensive common school system from 1964. The new system comprised three stages of three years each and a common national curriculum.

The new curriculum maintained the structure and content of the former grammar school in the upper-grades (6–9), towards which the preceding grades (1–3 and 4–6) had foundational and preparatory functions (Richardsson, 1983) to enable formal access to an academic curriculum for all pupils. Expressed by the parole of “one school for all” in national curricula (Lgr 62 to 80), an organisational platform had developed for teaching all pupils in the same school, but with a curriculum dominated by content and methods from the grammar-school (Lundgren, 1976). Other reform ideas about new methods of teaching towards democratic values in a non-authoritarian school for developing free thinking citizens took second place (Liedman, 2011). Meritocracy, maintaining academic standards, and equality of access were the aims, not equity (Husén, 1956). They led to cultural reproduction (Lundgren, 1976) and cultural domination (Liedman, 2011), but had little impact on social reproduction (Gesser, 1976), and so in 1972, the government formed another school inquiry commission to examine and account for why. The commission report (SOU 1974:53) perhaps unsurprisingly identified school culture and the structure and content of the academic curriculum as the main problems, as they reflected legacies of the bourgeois grammar school and tied educational differentiation to existing social structures (Lundgren, 1976). As in the parallel system:

• Academic attainment was discoursed and materialised in terms of rewards and advantages for avoiding physical work, which was presented as less worthy;

• School experiences prepared middle- and upper-middle class children for future intellectual work or higher education, and others for vocational activities or physical labour (Erikson & Jonsson, 1998; Reuterberg & Svensson, 1987).

Far from holding up everyone’s equal worth and value by offering justice and equal educational opportunities for all, Sweden’s comprehensive school reforms contradicted these ideals, both in policy statements and materially (Beach, 2018), in a system that produced (at best) weak individual social mobility within a society and institution where working-class pupils and their knowledge, values, identities and cultural capital were evaluated against bourgeois standards (Liedman, 2011). In rather the same way as that implied for social democracy generally one-hundred years earlier in Marx Critique of the Gotha Programme (Marx, 1875), rather than justice and equity for all, Sweden’s comprehensive school system actually exhibited all five faces of oppression described by Young (2004).

The new system failed to generate social equality or education justice (Beach, 2018). It had admittedly involved expansion and unification, but it also protected a subject curriculum and forms of selection that favoured middle and upper-middle-class pupils (Lundgren, 1976) and maintained levels of social reproduction and marginalisation in relation to social class, gender, and poverty (Gesser, 1976; Jonsson, 1993). Moreover, in the sense of Young (2004), there was exploitation and symbolic violence too. For although all students were financed equally by the State, as the accumulation of positive education capital went almost exclusively to middle- and upper-middle class pupils, so too did the favoured returns from investment. The reform false-consciousness of meritocracy and equality of access may have liberated the conscience of the political class (Marx, 1875), but it did not transgress bourgeois determinations of value (Liedman, 2011). Neoliberal educational politics could not ruin educational justice and equity because there was none to ruin in the first place:

1. Equality of access cannot determine justice and equality independently of what is being accessed, how or why, and schools engaged in preparing pupils for future education or work through instruction and evaluation in relation to a historically biased bourgeois curriculum that favoured pupils of national middle-class parents (Erikson & Jonsson, 1998; Lundgren, 1976).

2. Access to free instruction formed the main axis of change, but rather than improving possibilities for working class pupils to acquire an academic education, the extended system actually restricted their studies to an intellectual equivalent of the elementary school curriculum (Gesser, 1976; Lundgren, 1976). Changes had been made according to revisionist idealism and had more costs than benefits for the working class (Beach, 2018).

3. The social democratic government’s pattern of collaboration when forming the welfare state package was a problem. It involved (and offered concessions to) political parties and actors to the right of their own position at the expense of working class interests (Liedman, 2011; Therborn et al., 1978).

The social democratic party became very familiar with these kinds of negotiations and compromises, and expressed them as (i) a new “modern-way” forward that was (ii) in a common social interest (Therborn, 1986; Therborn et al., 1978): but which was really not true on either count (Lindbeck, 1997). Economic and other gains were claimed, but without empirical support were debatable (Lindbeck, 1997; Therborn et al., 1978). Concerning economic growth for instance, percentage GNP per capita was high in Sweden relative to other countries already from 1860, and had led to a country with strong state infrastructure investments that had been brought about through class-struggle rather than consensus (Therborn, 1986). Moreover, though this growth continued into the 1970s, it came then through industrial modernisation investments from Second World War export income and the exploitation of productive labour power (Therborn et al., 1978). It reached 804% against 1860 levels by 1960, compared to Japan 655, Denmark 447, the USA 398 and France 356, which were the next highest, and sustaining it became politically imperative to the success attributed to the Swedish model (Lindbeck, 1997).

The combination of existing and new (including female and imported) labour power supplied the motor of economic growth in the 1950s to 70s (De Los Reyes, 2001). It operated as a Swedish version of an international phenomenon of migration politics and exploitation (Randeria & Karragiannis, 2020) and generated workers’ wages, profit for capitalist enterprises, and taxation revenue for expanding social institutions, middle class-positions in them, and social mobility (Lindbeck, 1997). This made problems of justice and inequality even more obvious. For the new proletariat not only gained little recognition for the developments (De Los Reyes, 2001), the content and instructional experiences of the comprehensive-school nationalist and bourgeois curriculum:

• Materially devalued their children’s knowledge and cultural experiences and

• Not only pinned them to the foot of the ladder of education attainment (Jonsson, 1993), but also identified them (not the curriculum) as the problem.

Few institutional systems anywhere (or anytime) can have been more unjust and disingenuous towards the working-class than this (Beach, 2017b, 2018). Economic growth and the expanded comprehensive-school-infrastructure it generated was indebted to taxation-wealth brought about by the labour power of a multi-ethnic proletariat, but the education system actively contributed to the marginalisation of their children by exposing them to four of Young’s five faces of oppression. The education system had thus not only failed working class children (Gesser, 1976), it had been symbolically violent and exploitative towards both them, and their parents:

• Educational reforms had created schools that left working class children with poor possibilities for social advancement, elite careers and future political influence (Erikson & Jonsson, 1998; Gesser, 1976; Jonsson, 1993) and

• Official reports and education Bills that equated educational performances with merit, identified and targeted working class children as carrying learning difficulties and suffering from intellectual deprivation and a lack of study motivation and interest themselves, and in their homes (Beach, 2017a, 2017b).

• Education politics had created schools that produced low-performing working-class pupil performances, but it was the pupils and their parents and culture that were made responsible (Beach & Dovemark, 2007; Dovemark, 2004).

The new unified system was a disaster seen in terms of its justice and equity aims. Data and analyses by Gesser (1976) and Jonsson (1993) are very clear here. Moreover, if later studies concerning the democratic outlook of academically successful students and their solidarity reflect attitudes that were there already in the 1970s and 80s, outcomes were equally disastrous in terms of socialisation effects as well (Dovemark, 2004; Erlandson & Beach, 2014; Jonsson & Beach, 2015). Yet instead of challenging this failing system, politicians gave it continued broad support and extended it further. New reforms expanded and then merged upper-secondary academic and trade and vocational schools, forming the Integrated Gymnasium, with this leading later also to higher education expansion to accommodate the new school graduates. New university colleges (Regionala Högskolor) appeared in Örebro, Växjö, Karlstad and Linköping to add to the universities established earlier in Gothenburg, Stockholm and Umeå, and the technological Universities in Lund, Linköping and Luleå (Agevall & Olofsson, 2019). They meant that despite an economic downturn in the mid-70s (following the collapse of the Bretton Woods’ agreement and subsequent economic oil crisis in 1973), upper-secondary enrolment was possible in all but the most remote school districts by 1975 and there were higher education institutions in all national counties.

The school system that had offered working class pupils class-insults rather than class-enlightenment and had kept them out of universities, by expansion had become a vehicle for including them, if in lower proportions than others, and mainly in vocational programmes. There were lower inequalities now, between those on the inside and outside of the academic system (in terms of both social-class and gender), but inequality remained, as it was now present within the system itself (Agevall & Olofsson, 2019; Reuterberg & Svensson, 1987, 1998). It had been generated thanks to maintained investments despite an economic downturn and a change of government in 1976, neither of which seemed to have much effect on national educational politics (Börjesson, 2016). Broad support for claims about quality and equality were not possible but the system ran on (Andersson & Nilsson, 2000), if with slightly lower rates of expansion (Börjesson, 2016; Maisuria, 2017).

Creating uncertainty in the 1980s and a 1990s market turn in education politics

By the 1980s national inquiry reports and research publications by Therborn et al. (1978), Therborn (1986) and others had rendered social inequalities highly visible with regard to all public sector institutions, not only those of education, and following the Norwegian Power and Democracy Report in 1982, they were known to occur even in other Nordic states (Petersson, 1988). Political uncertainty about the social democratic model grew as a result, and in 1985 the social democratic government appointed a new national inquiry commission (Lindbeck, 1997), this time to look into the broad state of Swedish institutional efficiency, social fairness and democracy (Petersson, 1988). Directives to the commission (called the Power and Democracy Commission [PDC] in English) established that particular attention should be given to the uses citizens made of different social institutions, particularly women, and what risks and advantages there might be for institutional-democracy by decentralising state control and introducing greater individual influence (SOU 1990:44). A recognition of a need to transform (rather than expand) the public sector had emerged (Börjesson, 2016; Petersson, 1988).

Ideas about neoliberal governance and privatisation were increasing globally and in Sweden at this time (Lindbeck, 1997; Therborn, 2018). However, instead of endorsing them, in its final report the PDC warned against heavy private sector involvement and privatised systems as solutions to the problems of justice and democracy (SOU 1990:44), and asserted the need for further evaluations before the government introduced such changes. The social democratic government appeared to heed this warning at the time (Beach, 2010), but a government change in 1991 led to a series of reforms (such as Prop. 1991/92:95, 315 1992/93:230, 1995/96:200) that did not (Lundahl, 2002). Instead they allowed and even encouraged state authorities to act as agents in pushing forward the frontiers of the capitalist empire in the public sector (to paraphrase Hardt and Negri, 2000), by mirroring global economic aims for low inflation as an overriding macro-economic policy, and introducing new ambitions for private sector involvement in public services (Beach, 2018; Lindbeck, 1997; Therborn, 2018).

The vectors of hegemonic alliance of educational reform operated in new directions at this point compared to the 1940s to 1980s (Andersson & Nilsson, 2000; Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006). For as described in the Metropolitan and later the Upper-Secondary Commission Reports (SOU 1997:24 and 2008: 27), it was the 1991-elected right-coalition government that drove the neoliberal reform of the public sector, with support from the social democrats, instead of the other way around, and it used the findings from earlier inquiries about inequality and inefficiency in and of welfare services (including schools) when doing so (Börjesson, 2016; Lundahl, 2002, 2016).

There was what Harling et al. (2015) called a post-pedagogical political-landscape agreement from different actors (comprising the government, the OECD, the National Agency for Education, McKinsey, Sweden’s Municipalities, County Councils, schools and the media) and an informational flow of new discourses, about why schools (and other public sector intuitions) needed to become more efficient in dealing with individual educational needs and interests than before, and why this could only be achieved by creating individual choice systems and competitive service markets (Dovemark, 2004; Lindbeck, 1997; Puaca, 2013). This, and two further things were notable (Beach, 2018; Lundahl, 2002, 2016). They were that changes to education institutions and governance had:

1. Moved quickly (and with a considerable breadth of support) had quickly become permanent (Hardy et al., 2019; Lundahl, 2002);

2. Led to increased relative inequity and even middle-class social precarity within the social fabric (Dovemark et al., 2018; Yang-Hansen and Gustafsson, 2019) that was accepted as temporary collateral damage from decentralisation, effectivity gains, and the shift to a pluralist system (Harling et al., 2015; Lundahl, 2016).

The final report of the Economy Commission (SOU 1993:16) had warned of the risks of short-term difficulties, but stressed too that under existing economic conditions, despite these difficulties, unfettered public choice and competition were not just the best, but the only solution to the challenges facing the public sector (Beach, 2010; Harling et al., 2015), the survival of which was dependent on the government as far as possible:

1. Subcontracting service delivery to private organisations, guaranteeing the security of their investments and introducing incentives (such as profitability) in order to stimulate market growth (Lindbeck, 1997; SOU 1993:16);

2. Removing all political aims for state regulated quality from official policies and developing quality and equality discourses that connected future developments to the decisions of market empowered individual actors and system-performance indicators (Lindbeck, 1997; SOU 1993:16).

A commercially responsive largely “self-regulating” school market developed rapidly when aided in this way by narratives that highlighted the failures of the original state model, and emphasised the value added when individuals took greater personal responsibility (Beach & Dovemark, 2011; Dovemark, 2004; Dovemark et al., 2018; Fjellman, 2019; Harling et al., 2015). Guarantees offered by the state against individual liability through its pupil-voucher to facilitate “free parental choice” and other measures helped too (Lundahl, 2016; Lundahl et al., 2013). Yet of course the political turn was not just a matter of individual empowerment through the liberation of personal choice (Dovemark, 2004; Harling et al., 2015). It was about hegemony and harnessing consumer power to help open-up the educational infrastructure of people, places, artefacts and practices established by public funding to economic speculation and exploitation in private interests (Beach, 2010). It turned out to be a costly experiment in the education sector that was followed by decade and a half of attempts to try to control and repair the worst effects (Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006; Börjesson, 2016; Lundahl, 2002, 2016; Lundahl et al., 2013, 2014).

The revised education system (where schools that had been public assets had become objects of private speculation and consumption) was more not less unequal in terms of its deeper structural and surface relations (Allelin, 2019; Fjellman, 2019; Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2019). There were deeply uneven possibilities for choice-making between and within different regions (Fjellman, 2019), that were also unevenly socially exploited (Haley, 2017), and significantly so in some places (Bunar, 2010), with no evidence of improved system efficiency. Pupils’ average performance levels fell instead of rising (SOU 2017:35) yet the reforms were still broadly supported. However, in a now openly capitalist system of exchange, this was perhaps more logical:

1. Under new global conditions, schools, their professionals, and the bourgeois curriculum that had culturally dominated the interests and possibilities of working class pupils and repressed their collective class consciousness as a class in- (rather than for) itself, no-longer needed to dominate the working class in quite the same way. Global class-relations had changed.

2. Instead of producing reforms that repressed class consciousness by cultural domination, government reforms were now about opening up a new sea of opportunity for speculation and exploitation by enabling and helping businesses to gain access to education markets (Beach, 2010; Lindbeck, 1997).

3. The school system and infrastructure of buildings, materials and professional labour produced from taxation income during the era of comprehensive expansion was managerially and legally restructured for trading and exploitation in private economic interests (Lundahl, 2016), as a new mechanism of economic exploitation in the sense of Young’s model of injustice (Beach, 2018).

The reforms from 1990 thus helped to complete a full cycle of historical domination of the working class in Sweden’s educational system. However, their characteristics also signal that the actions and intentions of those who drove the changes were not exactly the same during the two periods (Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006; Beach, 2018; Lundahl, 2002, 2016). The contexts were different and the onus of capitalist interests had shifted, from carefully monitored repression and control of the working-class to something else, and this was also visible in the surface nature and characteristics of reform. The 1990 reforms were discoursed as self-monitoring (Fjellman, 2019; Harling et al., 2015). They:

1. Swarmed at high pace (Hardy et al., 2019) and have remained largely externally unevaluated for thirty years, whilst the comprehensive expansion had run slowly, sequentially and was continually subject to monitoring and evaluation;

2. Brought a decrease in GDP-expenditure per pupil (compared to increases earlier) and reductions in the number of specialised posts (such as school psychologists, leisure educators, student-counsellors and special-needs teachers) from the earlier period;

3. Left “ordinary teachers” with broadened responsibilities and more pupils but less economic resources and fewer support services. This contributed to stress and burnout through intensified boundary-less labour (Nordänger, 2002);

4. Pressed back costs per student, but working conditions were paying the price as teacher labour time and effort increased but salary levels did not.

The new (worsened) conditions of labour for teachers meant that help was needed. It came from new reforms for a new “flexible” ancillary labour force and disposable employment category (of teacher assistants). This labour category did not exist prior to the 1990 reform package (Hardy et al., 2019), but it quickly formed a new source of cheaper, less qualified labour power in what were (more often than before) privately owned schools, whose levels of exploitation of labour were protected from evaluation by law (Lundahl, 2016). The creation of the new labour category:

1. Led to diminished occupational and income equality in schools;

2. Occurred in a period of extended labour-market and other social inequalities in a society where the richest 1% of adults own 42% of all household wealth (from 18% in 2002), whilst the poorest 60% have no net wealth at all, and the poorest 30% have significant net debts (Therborn, 2018).

3. Coincided with falling relative wealth in society compared to 1940 to 1990 averages, and increases in the effects of private socio-economic background on education outcomes (SOU 2017:35; Yang Hansen & Gustafsson, 2019). These levels are now greater than they have been for seven decades but evaluations of the effects of changed conditions and processes of labour on these outcomes has not been forthcoming (Beach, 2018; Lundahl, 2016).

Something strange had taken place during the period of post-pedagogical neoliberal consensus, from the dominant perspective of human capital theory, according to the 2015 School Commission Report (SOU 2017:35). For although individual investments in education have been more emphasised than ever as essential for future social security and individual economic well-being; and despite total education investment having expanded (with more people staying longer at school and taking degrees than ever before); inequality had grown. Schooling for life (and to generate private profit) in socially and economically precarious conditions had become the new function of the education system (Beach, 2017a, 2017b; Beach & Sernhede, 2011, 2012; Dovemark & Beach, 2015, 2016) all the way up to universities, as class-divided social-spaces (Agevall & Olofsson, 2019; Beach & Puaca, 2014):

• The expanded integrated infrastructure from the 1940s onwards, in its restructured form, had openly extended social inequalities and led to a situation where not even a university degree guaranteed income and employment security;

• But significant decreases in the average value added to graduate income from a university degree, alongside significant increases in the differential value, status, opportunities and income added by different university degrees, from different institutions, had increased the importance of “correct choices” of courses and institutions (Beach & Puaca, 2014; Fjellman, 2019; Haley, 2017; Puaca, 2013).

There are differences then, regarding the two reform periods and their outcomes, but also continuities. For instance, “successful” choices of and in academic programmes and institutions correlated (as before) with factors of domicile, social-class, gender and other variables (ibid), yet despite these obvious correlations, middle- and upper-middle class elite-choosers still expressed themselves as fully deserving individuals who are well worthy of state investments in their performances and individual careers (Beach & Puaca, 2014; Erlandson & Beach, 2014; Puaca, 2013), and they also expressed that those who were less successful were usually inferior (Jonsson & Beach, 2015). Moreover, and in line with the predictions of cultural domination theory from Young (2004), as in Zur Mühlen’s fairy tale “Die Brillen” (The Glasses), such were the socialising effects of education that these others generally developed matching beliefs (Beach & Dovemark, 2011). Both under comprehensive expansion and following neoliberal reform, schools had thus successfully socialised the poor to see themselves and their kin as educationally inferior to others (Beach & Dovemark, 2011; Dovemark & Beach, 2016), who they also envisioned (and who envisioned themselves) as deserving their rewards.

Discussion

Did Sweden’s school politics from the 1940s to 1980s enhance education justice and create equality, and did subsequent market reforms from 1990 ruin these developments? The answer on both counts is of course no they did not, as what stands out instead is a continuous exploitation of the education system as a tool of cultural domination and exploitation in capitalist interests. Several features form strong socio-material and discursive markers of these claims. They include:

1. How reform political texts in both periods discoursed education system aims and changes as intending to contribute power to all citizens, whilst also (at the same time) continuing to reinforce the value of academic subject structures and content, and their bourgeois cultural heritage, as more worthy and valuable than corresponding elements of working class culture (Beach, 2018; Lundgren, 1976), thus mediating hegemonic links between social classes;

2. How system output reinforced class domination, as original class membership was statistically reflected in ultimate class positions and educational choices (Beach & Puaca, 2014; Gesser, 1976);

3. How the reproduction of four marginalising forms of injustice of class position, opportunity, cultural status and power (after Young, 2004) characterised political aims and practices in education along the lines of Wodak (2011);

4. How the political shift to neoliberal market governance realigned schools and education aims away from integration and state responsibilities and towards individual responsibility, competition, flexibility, freedom of choice and parental influence, but only as a shift from one weak form of steering commutarian philosophy to another (Beach, 2018; Harling et al., 2015).

What is signalled here then is historical continuity (not discontinuity) in the ways in which education politics for Sweden’s schools linked up with and reproduced capitalist hegemony (if slightly differently), between the investigated periods. In the first it involved the cultural domination of working-class identities and values. In the second, it involved opening up the public sector and its education institutions to competition, commodification and capitalist exploitation, which though purportedly to raise standards and increase consumer influence and efficiency (Harling et al., 2015; Lindbeck, 1997), actually involved recommending and passing laws that expanded the scope for private investments in education and protected private investors from risk (Beach, 2010). SOU 1993:16, 1994:101 and 2008:27 and Prop. 1990/91:85, 1991/92:95, 1992/93:230 and 1995/96:200 are examples. Thus, though the visible features of the two reform periods suggest they are different and have different aims, both of them are clearly serving dominant class and capitalist interests (Beach, 2018). Social democratic reforms from the 1940s to the 1990s protected the relations of capitalist production in an ideological sense (Lundgren, 1976) by

• As pointed out by Maisuria (2017), blocking the development of working-class class-consciousness and, in the sense of Young (2004)

• Helping to secure cultural domination of the working class and its values, identity and practices by obscuring and silencing the political and ideological manner of their subjugation through symbolic violence.

Materially these two points are obvious. Comprehensive schooling on principles of meritocracy did not aid the advance of the working class or generate greater political and socioeconomic equality at a collective level (Gesser, 1976; Lundgren, 1976). Instead in practice it produced continued class-oppression and exploitation and justified the emerging patterns of social reproduction by locating the blame in the characteristics of the oppressed, who were also denied access to critical tools for deconstructing the nature of their oppression, in line with Young (2004).

These failures were well-known politically by 1974 (SOU 1974:53), but were discoursed through Green and White Papers as coming about more by accident than design (Therborn et al., 1978), and as possible to resolve through further rounds of rolling reforms, incorporating evaluation-based system-revisions followed by further evaluation and more revisions (Liedman, 2011). Moreover, to an extent system-expansion also helped to mask inequalities, and it was not until 1991, when the then recently elected right-coalition government introduced the proto-capitalist idea of privatisation and competitive market governance, that system integration and expansion as mediators of justice and equality in and through the education system were seriously challenged (Börjesson, 2016). Education market governance became the new mediator of education quality, efficiency, and equality at this point (see e.g. Prop. 1991/92:95), which as an idea was of course absurd, and known to be so (Beach, 2010, 2018).

As Marx alluded to already in part 10 of Grundrisse, not even strongly regulated (let alone largely un/self-regulated) capitalist markets are able to mediate quality and equality in education or anywhere else, because by its definitive character capitalism (and capitalist markets) will always subjugate all other conditions, outcomes and effects of and from other forms of social production and relations, to the interests of the accumulation of money capital, and will not form a soil on which to sow quality and equality. They cannot and evidence from experiments with education markets bear this out. As was already very visible internationally by 1991, as an outcome from neoliberal educational governance in other countries, education markets form a soil on which bourgeois social relations of exploitation thrive not relations of justice or equity (Allelin, 2019; Beach & Dovemark, 2007; Börjesson, 2016).

However, at the same time as there are overriding similarities between the periods of reform in question, there are still some differences in terms of the wording of political reform and the characteristics of change that need to be accounted for. One concerns the scope and pace of change (Hardy et al., 2019). In the first period, reforms worked up slowly and successively from compulsory, to upper-secondary and higher education levels, and involved multiple evaluations and stakeholders in experimental field pilots and an adaptive sequential approach to system conversion that ran parallel to the development of institutional capacity, and took decades to complete (Dovemark, 2004). In the second period, changes moved quickly from pre- to upper-secondary schools, without field pilots, obvious forward planning, or extensive commissioned evaluations (Hardy et al., 2019; Harling et al., 2015; Lundahl, 2002, 2016). Yet even here there are clearly deeper characteristics related to the interests of capital involved (Beach, 2018). In the first phase (1940–1990):

1. Politicians used accumulated income from taxation of the economic growth generated by the labour power of the post-war multi-ethnic proletariat to generate a sequentially tested (in terms of its acceptance, function and resilience towards alternative ideologies) large and robust education infrastructure within a common education-unification project to produce citizens who could act resiliently against extremism (Liedman, 2011).

2. The system repressed the working class by cultural (curriculum) domination, contributed to social reproduction leading towards political marginalisation, and co-opted working-class class-consciousness as individual and utilitarian through the hegemonic operational concept/ideology of meritocracy.

These consequences had become very evident by 1970 (Gesser, 1976; Lundgren, 1976) and continued afterwards (Jonsson, 1993). However, despite the obvious failure of the system, investment levels remained high whilst economic growth remained high, and diminished only slightly when economic growth turned towards recession in the mid-1970s. Investments lowered significantly in fact, first only when ideological threats from communism had receded in 1991 following the dissolution of Soviet States (Therborn, 2018), and at which time (i.e. when ideological conditions could be considered more favourable), the state government reduced its budget output and levels of direct regulation and (now after 1990 at the beginning of the second period) drafted Green and White Papers that:

1. Discursively crafted new reforms “for saving the welfare state”;

2. Opened-up education infrastructure to private commercial interests and commodification (Beach, 2010);

3. Utilised taxation revenue to, as suggested by Lindbeck (1997), subsidise and safeguard the risks of private investors and stimulate market growth.

Legislation that had previously led to cultural production and reproduction in education in the dominant class interest had been replaced (Beach, 2018). But not by legislation that safeguarded justice and equity. Quite the opposite was the case. New legislations opened a previously repressive system to principles of legally safeguarded academic trading based on capitalist exchange relations (Beach & Dovemark, 2007). They contributed further injustices and stabilised capitalist interests even more aggressively than before, within a now unregulated normality of the direct exploitation of public assets and investments in private interests in the public sector (Beach, 2010; Therborn, 2018). This did not create class injustices, inequity, or the exploitation of inequity and inequality in education however. They already existed. What the reforms did create was the extended access of venture and other financial capitalists and public entrepreneurs to education markets (and their materially embodied economic value), along with economic stimuli and security for their investments (Lindbeck, 1997; Therborn, 2018).

Thus, the differences between the two periods are real enough (Andersson & Nilsson, 2000; Arnesen & Lundahl, 2006; Lundahl, 2002). But they are not simple differences between justice and equality in one period that was abandoned in the following one (Lundahl, 2016). Instead, the differences liken different choreographies between the state, education professionals, citizens and capitalist organisations (Hardy et al., 2019; Harling et al., 2015). They were choreographies of defence and protection in the first period and (following Hardt & Negri, 2000) unshackled attack that extended capitalist empire in the second (Beach, 2018).

Conclusions

The article considers two periods of educational political reform. In the first period from the 1940s to 1990, the dominance of the selection and transmission of content in the image of bourgeois notions of cultivation prevailed over other alternative curriculum codes (Lundgren, 1976). Reflecting Young’s concept of cultural domination, this curriculum control effectively allowed schools to contribute to the repression of working class consciousness and the relative subordination of working class identities and values. However, as cultural production was reflected also in social reproduction, which was then interpreted as demonstrating the failure of working class children and youth to make productive use of the education system and its possibilities; though consistently without attempts to prove the opposite (Liedman, 2011); political marginalisation was also reinforced, and the value of the cultural contribution to society of the working class and its productive labour further undervalued (De Los Reyes, 2001).

The educational reforms after 1990 were not necessarily worse in themselves than this. However, exploitation and relative inequities increased at the same time as cultural domination and symbolic violence continued. Extended exploitation included an (a) economically undercompensated intensification of teachers’ labour, (b) the creation and material exploitation of a new precarious category of labour, and (c) the usurpation of the historical labour power of the multi-ethnic proletariat embedded within education infrastructure. These changes reflect a deepened social-material absorption of the welfare state into the inertia of capital and they occurred with little serious political opposition (Therborn, 2018).

The Power and Democracy Commission final report (SOU 1990:44) warned of this possibility (and others too), but the warnings were overturned following alterative recommendations from the 1992 Economy Commission Report (SOU 1993:16). Relating to assumptions about a division of state and private responsibilities, in a similar way to the 1946 commissioners in their report (SOU 1948:27) relating to the recommendations of a preceding (1940) commission, the 1992 commissioners fulfilled government desires by recommending changes to political institutions in line with government ideology. Moreover, and again in a similar way to the government in 1948, the 1993 government acted in line with recommendations from its commission, by putting propositions to parliament that were subsequently passed into Laws for reforming schools and other public-sector institutions (Beach, 2018).

Even in terms of the framing of reform practices then, there were more (and stronger and more significant) similarities between what took place at key-moments of reform in 1946 and 1991/92, than differences. Moreover, whatever differences there were, they did not include the production of greater educational justice and equity from 1940 to 1990 that was ruined afterwards. On the contrary, neoliberal education politics reflect and appeal to a particular psyche of success, ambition, difference and superiority that was already present and established by 1990 (Dovemark, 2004) and that allowed those who self-identify in this way (i.e. as successful and ambitious) to sympathise with and support neoliberal reforms as a way to gain more personal benefit from the public sector and its schools (Beach, 2018).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).