Sweden’s just education reforms: perpetuating cultural domination

Using political text analysis and meta-ethnography, this article develops an immanent criticism of Sweden’s education reforms from 1940 onwards from the perspective of two main goals of education justice and equality. Addressing political texts and ethnographic research, it identifies a discourse of just reform but also material conditions that contradict the realisation of this discourse in terms of fostering an inclusive and equitable society. Justice and equality are contested concepts to operationalise and measure. However, by ignoring pedagogical and curriculum biases that create unequal starting points in education systems for different people and reproducing deeply ingrained class, gender, and race-based assumptions about the value of education and the kinds of competences needed for school success, Sweden’s education reform history did not generate foundations for justice and equality. It upheld conditions for maintained injustice and inequality and created reasons to question the genuine intent of the reform instead.