How citizenship education should be designed and what it should aim for is debated. The Swedish national curriculum describes the democratic mission for the compulsory school as imparting respect for human rights, fundamental democratic values and preparing students to responsibly participate in societal life. This mission is to be implemented in all school subjects. Here, we aim to shed light on how these ideas are expressed in the curriculum documents for science education in compulsory school in terms of argumentation and critique. We perform an analysis of the national syllabuses and commentary materials and also discuss the results from educational philosophy perspectives. First, we scrutinize the idea of developing students’ abilities to engage in argumentation, argumentation as means to reach consensus and argumentation as dissensus and agonism from a radical democratic perspective. Second, we scrutinize the idea of critique as expressed in the documents in relation to what has been described as a neo-liberal discourse of independence and integrity. We summarize our findings in what we suggest to be a tension between consensus and agonism. We point to affordances and constraints in the curriculum documents concerning possibilities of bringing together argumentation and critique in what we call critical deliberative education.