Folkbildning i (av)koloniseringens skugga. Demokrati, nationella mytologier och solidaritetens paradoxer

Abstract

In Sweden and among Swedish popular movements there has long been a great willingness to share experiences from establishing the “Swedish model” of welfare and democracy to countries in other parts of the world. In this sharing of experience popular adult education has had an important role. Over the years, there have also been several attempts to spread the “Swedish model” of popular adult education, i.e. study circles and folk high schools. In this article, we analyze the large-scale project of establishing Folk Development Colleges (FDC:s) in Tanzania in the 1970s and 1980s,by emphasizing the ways in which Swedish popular adult educators have described the FDC project. Theoretically, the article is based on a postcolonial framework, highlighting the continuing importance of the legacies of colonialism in today’s society. One of the main conclusions in the article is that in the process of “exporting” the idea of popular adult education to other parts of the world, there is an on-going formation of national self-images in contrast to images of “the Other”, where there is a constant risk of reproducing ideas from a colonial past.