“Life” and Democratisation in the Swedish Welfare State School: Experimental Research Projects on Children’s “Life Questions” in Religious Education, Late 1960s to Early 1990s

Abstract

“Life questions” (livsfrågor) was inserted in religious education in the Swedish curriculum for comprehensive school in 1969. This was in line with the democratisation aspirations of one school for all, in which both modernisation and secularisation were important aspects. In relation to this, the National Board of Education commissioned a large experimental research project on teaching methodology in religious education that was later followed by a series of projects focusing on children’s life questions. This article explores the history of three of these projects and their knowledge production and discusses how the recontextualisation of religious education and the pedagogic interest in life questions related to school reforms during 1960–1990s. Life questions as a student-centred pedagogical model had its peak in the 1980s but lost its central role in the new prescriptive model of knowledge that was launched in the curriculum of 1994. Life questions aspired to the ambitions of democratisation through individualisation and can be seen as a continuation of earlier school reforms aiming at the individualisation of religious practice.