The five-day school week with Saturdays off was introduced in Swedish schools in 1968. The decision was preceded by a debate in which the student voice was unusually present, not least through a nationwide vote among pupils in 1959. The vote was given a lot of space in the mass media, with several newspaper articles, radio and TV programs. The debate about the five-day week is thus a case that sheds light on two neglected themes in the history of education: school democracy as well as how it was represented in the media. The aim of the presentation is to discuss the conditions and features of this national campaign for/against a five-day school week. Why was it introduced at this very point in time? What does the character of the campaign say about the space for pupil voice in the late 1950s? What can the campaign reveal when it comes to understandings on temporal rhythms at this moment of time?

Theoretically, the presentation draws on the history and sociology of time (Zerubavel, 1981). Of particular relevance is the temporal rhythm that is called the week (Henkin, 2021), and how we can understand attempts to change the temporal order of societies as well as how we can understand temporal conservatism. Drawing on the history of the cultural meaning of the week as well its individual days, the study will shed light on how school weeks are given meaning, and how attempts to change the temporal order of schools have been framed.

The study is based on media representations of the referendum on the five-day school week. The referendum was discussed in different media outlets – newspapers, weekly and monthly magazines, TV, radio as well as in a national magazine for pupils. The campaign also included the use of pupil constructed media in a wider sense, with posters and other means of propaganda being put to use. Rather than studying one particular media type, the study will thus study a larger media system (Harvard & Lundell, 2010) to get a fuller understanding of how different media types were interrelated and how the campaign for/against a new temporal order of schools circulated in society at large.

The vote on five-day school week was an unprecedented event as pupils for the first time on a national scale got the opportunity to vote on an issue of central importance for their life in schools. Being highly mediatised it was an example of how politics became a spectacle (Edelman, 1988). It is also an interesting case of how youth became political actors (Bessant, 2021) and how a social movement developed in symbiosis with the media (Gitlin, 2003). The result of the campaign for/against five-day school week is somewhat surprising. A large majority of the voting pupils wanted to maintain a six-day school week. Possible explanations for this result in the vote are discussed. One can be labeled “temporal conservatism”, another has to do with the zero-sum game of school schedules, a third will be related to the role of media as opposed to national pupil organizations as arenas for democratic deliberation over educational issues.

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