According to an influential narrative in educational historiography, the Swedish educational system underwent a drastic change during the 1990s, moving towards a more individualistic and marketized system. Without denying the relevance of this perspective, I argue that we can trace impulses to the reforms undertook around 1990 far back in the post-war educational policies. In an attempt to nuance the image of a radical system change, I argue that the strive to democratize and to make the educational system more equal during the first decennia after the war, when radicalised, successively started to counteract what the same impulses had hitherto inspired to build up. Showing how the way in which educational politics has been assumed to deploy in time, what French historian François Hartog denominates regimes of historicity, I maintain that a pertinent shift took place in the 1970s. Since then, I discern a tendency towards a stronger emphasis of the present at the expense of both past and future. I argue that this presentist tendency can be related to the radicalized promotion of a more democratic and equal school. The problem is approached by way of querying how the ideal of placing the pupil in centre was transformed during the period 1935-1992.

François Hartog, Régimes d'historicité (Paris: Seuil, 2012); Joakim Landahl, ’Skolämnen och moralisk fostran: En komparativ studie av samhällskunskap och livskunskap’, Nordic Journal of Educational History 2, no. 2 (2015; Tomas Englund (edt.), Utbildningspolitiskt systemskifte? (Stockholm: HLS, 1996); Lisbeth Lundahl, ’Decentralisation, deregulation, quasi-markets – and then what?’ Journal of Education Policy 17, no. 6 (2002): Tomas Englund; Läroplanens och skolkunskapens politiska dimension (Göteborg: Daidalos, 2005); Mattias Börjesson, Från likvärdighet till marknad: en studie av offentligt och privat inflytande över skolans styrning i svensk utbildningspolitik 1969-1999 (Örebro: Örebro University, 2016); Kristina Boréus, Högervåg: nyliberalismen och kampen om språket 1969-1989 (Stockholm: Tiden, 1994); Henrik Berggren & Lars Trägårdh, Är svensken människa: gemenskap och oberoede i det moderna Sverige (Stockholm: Norstedts Förlag, 2015); Johanna Ringarp, ‘Utbildningspolitiken – från kommunaliseringen till PISA’ in Det långa 1900-talet: när Sverige förändrades, ed: Anders Ivarsson Westerberg, Ylva Waldemarsson, Kjell Österberg (Finland: Boréa, 2014).