Session Information
23 SES 07 B, The European Education Space after the Economic Crisis
Symposium
Contribution
Sweden has been a social democracy with a strong emphasis on constructing education for equality and for prioritizing the social and citizenship functions of schooling. But since the 1990s there have been extensive decentralization reforms, the introduction of NPM techniques, and the introduction of a publicly subsidized private system of education that resulted in one of the most marketized schooling system in Europe (Blomqvist 2004). At the same time Sweden retains the ‘school for all’ ideal, as an underlying feature of a national education identity (Alexiadou et al 2016). This continues to be an important dimension to the policy narrative of education reforms. In this presentation we analyse Swedish education policies as particular national configurations of global and European trends, by focusing on the remaking of social-democratic education purposes and ways of organizing education. Initially, we discuss the evolution of education policy in Sweden over time, and its selective adaptation and adjustment to discourses of neoliberalism. In this context, we also discuss Sweden’s relationship to the EU, as a ‘reluctant European’ (Gstöhl 2002), and the more or less silent processes of Europeanisation. We also bring forward some empirical examples from our previous research that show the complex relations between global and European ideas and their national embeddedness in this re-made education policy landscape. Our analysis draws from research that conceptualizes the shifts in education policy processes as framed by neoliberal ideologies that have a global reach. We also connect to debates around the embeddedness of such travelling ideas in national and local settings, as well as the consequences of this localization for schooling outcomes (Jones et al. 2008; Waldow 2009).
References
Alexiadou, N., Arreman-Erixon, I., Dovemark, M., Holm, AS. Lundahl, L. & Lundström, U. (2016). Managing inclusion in competitive school systems: The cases of Sweden and England. Research in Comparative and International Education, 11(1), 13-33. Blomqvist, P. (2004). The choice revolution: Privatization of Swedish welfare services in the 1990s’ Social Policy and Administration, 38 (2), 139-155. Jones, K., Cunchillos,R. Hatcher,N. Hirtt,R. Innes,S. Johsua,J. Klausenitzer. 2018. Schooling in Western Europe: The New Order and its Adversaries. Palgrave McMillan. Waldow, F. (2009), ‘Undeclared imports: Silent borrowing in educational policy‐making and research in Sweden’, Comparative Education, 45 (4), 477-494
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