ABSTRACT
In the late 19th century and early 20th century, the so-called social question—how to handle poverty—was a political challenge cutting across the European states under modernization. Education politics, often overlapping with social politics, was seen as a main tool. However, the political efforts not only addressed social difference, but also religious difference, which were increasingly discussed as a “cultural” question. This was also the case in the Nordic states where the education systems became a crucial arena for not only distributing welfare—and thus providing answers to the social question—but also for handling the religious question by reworking the relation between the state and religion.
Late 19th- and early 20th-century Sweden is a prominent example of Nordic education reforms leading up to the mid- and late 20th-century welfare state school. Through the examination of this Swedish example in comparison timewise with the similarly motivated efforts in the Third Republic France, this chapter shows how welfare state education aimed at educating in and co-producing new social imaginaries of religious, cultural, and social differences and cohesion. On this basis, the chapter will question how exceptional the Nordic model for educating citizens in an allegedly secular society really can be.
