The domination and exploitation of working class values, identities and labour-power in Sweden’s comprehensive school extension and neo-liberal market reforms

Questions about Sweden’s education system often consider the extent to which educational reforms between 1940 and 1990 contributed to social justice, equity and equality, and the extent to which neoliberal market reforms from the early 1990s onwards have reversed this tendency. Using Young’s model of structural injustice, Wodak’s critical discourse analysis, and a historical materialist research outcomes analysis relating to investigations of education justice, equity and equality, the present article explores this possibility. It suggests three things. 1. From a materialist perspective on class-history, social democratic reforms from 1940 increased system capacity and retention and created a well-resourced and extended comprehensive school system with a shared curriculum for all pupils up to age 16, except for those with serious intellectual and physical difficulties. 2. However, these reforms failed to generate educational justice, equity or equality. Contributing to modernisation, economic growth and the stabilisation of capitalist production relations were far clearer aims and were also attained. 3. Neoliberal reforms after 1990 led to decreased relative education equity, but they did not create inequality and injustice, nor remove statements about equality aims. They did however change their discursive associations and realisation possibilities.