Selling out Education in the Name of Digitalization: A Critical Analysis of Swedish Policy

Abstract

Sweden aspires to become ‘the best in the world at utilizing the opportunities of digitalization’ and is internationally recognized for its digital performance. Education has been identified as instrumental for the digital transformation of Swedish society, and efforts are made to accelerate the digitalization of the educational system. As governments’ demands for digitalization get increasingly loud and persuasive, it is important to critically explore what values and ideologies are embedded in the argumentation. In this study, we use Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the Swedish Digitalization Commission’s report ‘For digitalization with the times’. Our results demonstrate that the policy argumentation, despite being anchored in traditional Swedish welfare values, is characterized by a coherent and reductionist neoliberal framing of education. Students are represented as self-managing entrepreneurial citizens with a moral obligation to renew their human capital and adapt to market demands, while the educational system is constructed as a flexible, largely automated, infrastructure for ‘life-long learning’, in which teaching is reduced to ‘facilitating’. We suggest that such discourses around education in Swedish policy rest upon three preconditions: digitalization as an interconnective policy object, Swedish digitalization policy making as soft governance, and the Swedish welfare model as susceptible to discursive drift.

Keywords

• critical discourse analysis
• digitalization
• higher education
• policy
• neoliberalism
• welfare