Swedish pre-schools and schools are required to adhere to the national curriculum for the respective educational stages pre-school, compulsory school and upper secondary school. The curricula include statements about the fundamental value base for Swedish education and overall goals and guidelines. The two school curricula also include subject syllabuses, which state the central educational content in each school subject and set evaluation standards for grading. The three curricula were screened for explicit references, but also implicit connections, to rights, using the guiding questions as the main tool. The analysis showed that the relevance of human rights for education is in the curricula mainly connected to the responsibility of education to foster values in students. The significance of children developing knowledge about human rights is given less weight in the curricula, and a responsibility of education to support children’s competence to practice rights is very weakly expressed. The child/young person is constructed in an ambivalent way – the child is talked about both as a citizen to be, and as a full participant in the educational context. Influence is in line with this ambivalence sometimes motivated with ‘preparation’ for the future, and sometimes motivated with reference to rights here and now.