This presentation is to be understood as a curriculum and policy driven study about the legitimacy of RE-education at upper secondary school by tracing its educative roots and societal demands to the upcoming school system that came to being in the 1960’s. The 1965 upper secondary school curriculum (Lgy 65) was a major reform that changed previous structures and laid the foundation for the modern Swedish upper secondary school. It involved an integration of previously preparatory school, technical and vocational school and girl school into a broader upper secondary school system, with five streams (humanities, social sciences, economics, natural sciences, and technology), with the aim of increasing accessibility and adapting to the needs of society, which paved the way for the later, more integrated upper secondary school 1970 (Lgy70) (Grahn, 2021).

Even if the school system prior to 1965 stood on different parallel pillars with different purposes, content and learning goals, the subject of Christianity or Christian education was their common denominator before the reform 1965. RE-education has historically played a dominant role in Swedish schools to educate and foster the upgrowing generation, first to educate them in Christianity, then about Christianity and other religions, and later learning from and about religions (Jonsson & Månsson 2021, 2022, 2024). It is worth to note that after the reformation 1965 the upper secondary syllabus changed from Christianity to religion and in 1969 the syllabus for elementary school underwent the same change (Jonsson & Månsson, 2024).

Our theoretical framework is inspired by Thomas Popkewitz’s (2004, 2010) understanding of a school subject and its relation to socialisation. The school subject of religion is mandatory in upper secondary education – for both vocational and theoretical programs. Even if the school subject is rooted in the university subject, it has little or nothing to do with the status and recognition its mother discipline has on the academic field (Goodson, 1998). It is, according to Popkewitz (2010) and Ivor Goodson (1998), a question of the subject’s transformation from an academic subject to a school subject to fit into the structure and purpose of schooling and teaching processes. The governing principles in this refining and politically controlled process are, according to Popkewitz (2010), about controlling the child’s behavior, personality, relationships and emotions in order to place the child in a certain regularity and social order. In other words, the content of a school subject exceeds the question about how the teacher should address a specific content to the pupils, it has a general educational (or didactical) dimension as it also expresses its normative and educational principles that shape the pupil to become part of the existing society (Künzli, 2010; Klafki, 2010). Hence, we view this research as a study in general didactics with a RE-educational agenda, or interest, namely the role of RE-education in the school’s general educational and fostering mission (Jonsson & Månsson, 2022). Just like any school subject, the subject of religion follows the same ‘zeitgeist’ as the entire education reform (Englund, 2005).

In our presentation, we will start with a brief historical overview over the development of the Swedish modern upper secondary school to give our presentation a historical context. Then we will specifically focus on the reform that led to a new school system with a special interest in the general aim for upper secondary school and more specifically in RE-education in Lgy65 and Lgy70. We conclude this presentation by discussing some didactical implications of the 1965 reform in general and for RE-education in particular and highlight some significant educative ambitions for upper secondary school that might be inherited in the curriculums from 1994–2025.

Methodologically our presentation is a historical-based investigation with a special focus on the upper secondary reform in 1965 and the curriculums from 1965 and 1970, since a curriculum reflects the state’s ambitions to educate the upgrowing generation and are thus a normative document that shapes its purpose and content over time (Englund 2005). The empirical material for our text analysis consists primarily of curriculums (Lgy65, Lgy70), the Swedish Government Inquiries (e.g. SOU 1963) and other educative polity texts (e.g. Prop. 1964:171) that have had special significance for the development of RE-education in the Swedish upper secondary school in relation to the overall purpose written in Lgy65 and Lgy70. In our work of collecting and analysing the empirical data, we used a purpose-related and thematic analysis (Braun & Clark, 2022). The analysis is at a descriptive level because governing documents are not formulated as subjective perceptions and therefore constitute a contribution to an ongoing conversation about RE-education in the Swedish upper secondary school over time. First, we closely read the documents to be able to identify time-typical formulations in relation to the current societal and political context. Second, we kept attention to the specific vocabulary of documents and the public opinion. The time-typical formulations identified in the first was in our third step relate to the ‘zeitgeist’ of society. It was the specific vocabulary of documents and the ‘zeitgeist’ of society that received special attention in the second round of our reading. The time-typical formulations identified in the first reading then became possible in a third step of the reading to operationalize and relate to the study’s purpose and prevailing ‘zeitgeist’.

The reformation of upper secondary education was part of a new education policy concerning the whole educational system and was based on the idea that education should be a means of achieving a more democratic society. The aim was to create a society where everyone had the opportunity to participate in society on equal terms. In accordance, RE-education, shifted from education in Christianity to gain knowledge and understanding of other religious systems and beliefs.

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