Identities and Citizenship Education: Controversy, crisis and challenges. Selected papers from the fifteenth Conference of the Children’s Identity and Citizenship in Europe Academic Network

The article aims to discuss the school's education for citizenship and democracy in light of the economic crisis in the early 1990s and the subsequent depletion of the Swedish welfare state. Increased economic inequality, exclusion and marginalization of the school as well as in society in general raise the question about the school equivalency. The discussion sets out from a theoretical approach and a historical perspective to visualize how the meaning and policies of citizenship and democracy have changed and further to make comparisons between the experiences from the Swedish popular movement, the welfare state social engineering and the current challenges in multicultural Sweden. The article concludes with a discussion of need to (re) introduce a class perspective on democracy and education for citizenship in Swedish schools.