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The 19th century educational system in Sweden was socially segmented. Children of the working classes was educated in elementary schools (Folkskola) and children from the middle and upper classes of society was sent to grammar and secondary schools (Läroverk). Thus, the social stratification of society was organizationally reproduced by the school system (Petterson 1992; Florin & Johansson 1993; Larsson 2014; Sandin 2020). While e.g. research on England has shown that the social class hierarchy was continuously constructed by narratives in school textbooks (Heathorn 2000) the question remains unexplored in the case of Sweden. This paper explores how the parallel school system contributed to class formation by investigating the descriptions of class and class society in pedagogical objects used in the different school forms. We do this in two steps. First, we give examples of how social class and class society was described in different textbooks. Secondly, we investigate the same themes in essays written by students.

Theoretically, we discuss textbooks as a kind of travelling objects with ideological contents and social vernaculars. By investigating the social concepts and images in the textbook narratives, we can analyze how the state offered pupils different social identities in the elementary schools and the grammar and secondary schools. The question of self-identification cannot be studied in the textbooks themselves, which is why we investigate an additional resource, namely student essays (Landquist 1951). Our hypothesis is that the student essays could bear witness to how the pupils transferred the subject matter from textbooks into their own crafting of the world. By this approach we hope to track the ideological path of social narratives from the process of formulating an ideology of a social order in the textbooks, to the reception and textual reproduction materialized in the student essays.

The sources used in the paper is Swedish textbooks and students essays from the latter half of the 19th century. From the 1860’s and onwards, the state undertook actions to promote the production and dissemination of new textbooks, for example Claes Theodor Odhner’s and Carl Grimberg’s textbooks about Swedish history (Odhner 1870; Grimberg 1906). In the first part of the paper we mainly focus on these wiedly spread and used books (Granskning… 1887; Torbacke 1993; Wickström 2005). Odhner and Grimberg wrote different versions of their textbook for different school forms. The paper explores how this shaped their narratives so that the main ideological imperative was that the pupils of the elementary schools should identify with individuals from the lower-strata of society, while the children (i.e. the boys) of the grammar and secondary schools were supposed to identify with the middle and upper classes. But did pupils reproduce the state shaped visions of the roles of workers and industrialist, farmers or manors, rich and poor, and the relationship between different social classes? Lastly, we indicate how the textbooks “travelled” to the pupils, who read and interpreted its content, and retold the desciptions and images in their essays.

Bibliography

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Granskning av läroböckerna för folkskolan jemte grundsatserna för deras uppställning. Underdånigt utlåtande afgivet den 24 mars 1887 af utsedde kommitterade. 1887.

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