Diligent and docile workers: descriptions of the working poor and the social order in the Läsebok för folkskolan, 1868–1920s

Abstract

ABSTRACT The educational system in nineteenth-century Sweden was, as in many other industrialising states, segregated by social class. Children of the economically and politically marginalised classes were educated in basic primary subjects in the nationwide Folkskola (primary schools). From 1868 to the early 1940s, the government issued, subsidised, and distributed the Läsebok för folkskolan (Reader for Primary School; “the Reader”). Besides poems and songs, the Reader contained religious, fictitious, moral, and historical texts – all wrapped in an explicit nationalist discourse. However, it also contained images and ideologies about social class which have remained unexplored. The representations and social vernaculars in the Reader about how children of the working poor should identify and conduct themselves in order to grow up as functional members of a bourgeois society have been more or less overlooked. This paper deals with the images of the poor and marginalised in the Reader. We suggest not only that the Swedish state reproduced a class-based society through a segmented school system, but that the social descriptions in the book were aimed to produce diligent and docile workers to serve the political and economic interests of the dominant classes.