The Nordic Model and the Educational Welfare State in a European Light: Social Problem Solving and Secular-Religious Ambitions when Modernizing Sweden and France

In late 19th century and early 20th century, a groundbreaking period for Nordic education reforms, the so-called social question – how to handle poverty – was a key political challenge cutting across the (rising) nation-states and (declining) empires of Europe. Education politics, often overlapping with social politics, was seen as a main tool. However, the political efforts in the European states under modernization did not only address social difference but also religious difference, increasingly discussed as a “cultural” question. This was also the case in the Nordics where battles about the status of the Evangelical Lutheran state churches took place and mobilized different denominational voices as well as voices critical of religion. The education systems were in this context considered an arena for creating new strategies of social and cultural cohesion. Reforming the education systems hence became a crucial arena for not only distributing welfare ‒ and thus providing answers to the social question with regard to poverty ‒ but also for handling the religious question, by reworking the relation between the state and religion.
Through the examination of late 19th- and early 20th-century Sweden as a prominent example of Nordic education reforms leading up to the mid- and late 20th-century welfare state school ‒ compared with timewise similar and similarly motivated efforts in Third Republic France ‒ the chapter shows how social and welfare state education aimed at educating into and thus simultaneously co-produce new social imaginaries of religious, cultural and social difference and cohesion. On this basis, the chapter will question how exceptional the Nordic model for educating citizens in an allegedly secular society can be said to be.