Tracking the Sources of Folkbildning: From Education for the People to Education by the People

Throughout much of Sweden's early history, the Swedish Church exerted almost total control over the Swedes’ collective moral upbringing, thought, and behavior. After the Reformation of the sixteenth century and with greater intensity during the next 100 years, Lutheran priests conducted home visits to monitor, inter alia, the parishioners’ literacy, their biblical knowledge, and skills in reciting and recounting their knowledge of Luther's Small Catechism.Footnote ¹ State officials eventually realized that these home visits could also be used to count and monitor the population in other ways and in 1686 they enacted a “law on church registration” (lagen om kyrkobokföring) for the whole country, which charged priests with more tasks in connection to home visitations, such as collecting demographic information about every parishioner and keeping records in the parish catechetical register (husförhörslängden). Although intended principally as a population register, these data also became a useful tool in the church's preaching, in maintaining church discipline, and in promoting public health. The church books contained highly accurate and detailed records of parishioners’ birth, baptism, marriage, death (including the causes), disease, disability, tax capacity, character (with notes on personal traits that the priest had noticed), drunkenness, population movements, activity, occupation, participation in the Eucharist, and ratings for catechetical knowledge, as well as notes on reading or literacy.Footnote ²

One effect of the Swedish Reformation, which the Church Act of 1686 helped to document, had been a higher rate of literacy compared to that of other European countries. By the mid-1700s more than eighty percent of the population in Sweden could read, while the equivalent share was only fifteen percent in Central Europe.Footnote ³ This increased literacy was one of the many changes that accompanied the Swedish people's shift toward the Evangelical-Lutheran church during and after the Reformation. Increased literacy was by no means encouraged in order to develop knowledgeable and independent citizens; rather its aim was to teach ordinary people to assimilate the main texts of Christianity. The increased literacy did make it possible for more people to read the Christian scriptures on their own, without a priest's enforced presence. But it also made it possible for them to interpret the texts in their own ways, as well as to read other, more “harmful” texts of which the church certainly disapproved.Footnote ⁴

In this era inquisitive believers gathered in so-called “conventicles” throughout the country, where they studied the Bible in groups and made worship arrangements. Readers or “conventiclers,” as participants were usually called, developed insights and learned a lot in the conventicles’ nonthreatening dialogic milieu. One of the things they learned was that they could understand the content of the scriptures on their own, without any supervising intermediary.Footnote ⁵ Over time, the autonomous conventicles grew in both scope and intensity. Worried by these developments, church authorities secured a Royal Decree in 1726, which imposed more stringent requirements concerning biblical interpretations.Footnote ⁶ The decree barred parishioners from reading the Bible in groups and interpreting the text without the participation of a priest.

Once people could read, however, and believed in their own ability to interpret the Bible, the church was powerless to prevent the conventiclers from meeting. The more the clergy tried to assert its power over people, the more people, especially the literate and the faithful, resisted their oppression. The resistance then gradually grew into a revolt against various kinds of injustices. “Readers,” influenced by various radical revivalist movements, began preaching the value of human dignity and fraternity.

The extensive reach of this revivalist culture eventually paved the way for later social reform movements, especially the temperance and the labor movements. The personal values and ideals of the revivalists, beliefs apart, were similar to those embraced by many activists in these later movements. All three, for example, stressed the importance of “skötsamhet” or “good character,” a complicated combination of industriousness, moderation, sobriety, thoughtfulness, and reliability.Footnote ⁷ The educational culture of the revivalist groups also carried over to the educational efforts of the temperance and labor movements, eventually crystallizing into what we know today as “study circles.”Footnote ⁸ The study circle, like a conventicler group, emphasizes dialogue and discussion with one's peers as the best way to understand the world and how to be in it. The goal in each case is to create and sustain an alternative public arena. The revivalist movements, of course, focused more on their vision of a transcendental, postmortem world, whereas the temperance and labor movements focused on improving people's life in this world.Footnote ⁹ But reading in study circles encouraged a reflective attitude, as well as collective learning, as participants read common material and talked with one another in order to make sense of what they were reading. As we shall see below, just such a pursuit of knowledge and education in a study circle environment became a key strategy of the labor movement as it worked to fulfill its social vision.

Two additional intellectual currents need to be added to the picture before we can properly understand the roots of folkbildning in Swedish culture. They are the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the New Humanism of the nineteenth century. Enlightenment's advocates, also known as philosophes, attacked the dominant authority figures of traditional society, especially the nobility and the church. They constantly inveighed against the paralyzing influence of nobles and the clergy on the progress of science and the ability of people to think for themselves. Reason and experience, they argued, rather than revelation and scripture, ought to guide the search for knowledge. Rational understanding, grounded in experience, was essential in order to ensure individual happiness and social prosperity. In the political realm, such rational understanding meant the rule of law, the democratization of political authority, and recognition of the inalienable natural rights of each individual member of society.

The ideas and commitments of the philosophes had a lasting influence on European thought and a range of philosophical systems, including positivism and historical materialism.Footnote ¹⁰ So, too, did the second major current behind the emergence of folkbildning: the “New Humanism” of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose vision of education as personal development (Bildung in German) played a key role. Bildung, according to Humboldt, involved the harmonious development of an individual's abilities, and the actualization of their humanity, through education. While the advocates of Enlightenment focused more on free thought and critical thinking, the new humanists emphasized the importance of fostering individual development and personal growth. Both shared a faith in science and technology as the basis for social progress. But the New Humanists also encouraged the revival of classical languages and the study of the classical texts and languages as a complement to the new sciences. And the goal of both orientations was the same: human emancipation. Both the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century and the New Humanism of the nineteenth took human beings and actually-existing human societies as their point of departure.Footnote ¹¹ Social progress was the aim, but Bildung was its vehicle.

The Dawn of the Swedish Labor Movement

Sweden experienced dramatic demographic changes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1850 and 1920 the Swedish population grew from 3.5 to 5.9 million. During the same period, just over one million people emigrated, mainly to the United States. Within the country, the urban population also increased sharply from ten percent of the whole in 1850 to almost fifty percent in 1920. Industrialization took off, as railways and other means of communication facilitated increased foreign and domestic trade. The proportion of the population living by agriculture fell from 72.4 percent in 1870 to 48.8 percent in 1910. The corresponding share of the nonagricultural sector, which was highly concentrated on iron ore and timber, rose from 27.6 percent to 51.2 percent of the workforce.Footnote ¹² A diverse working class consisting of mechanics, machine operators, small traders, craftsmen, miners, and lumberjacks gathered together in the new industrial towns that grew up along the coast and the railroad lines. In addition, a large number of landless farm laborers settled on the outskirts of the new towns, where they constituted a reserve labor force for the expanding industrial economy.Footnote ¹³

These changes in Swedish society gave rise to new collective needs and interests, which encouraged the growth of new working-class movements with economic, social, ideological, and political aspirations. Among the important influences on the early Swedish labor movements were the French utopian socialists and German communists, especially those grouped around the Communist League, on behalf of which Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto. A Swedish translation of the Manifesto, attributed to the socialist Per Götrek, appeared in 1848, the same year as the German original. Götrek and his comrades had close relations with Europe's socialist movements and participated actively in Stockholm's education circle (bildningscirkel).Footnote ¹⁴

The Stockholm circle had been founded in 1845 by the master tailors Olof Renhult and Sven Trägårdh and the physician Johan Ellmin, in order to raise the workers’ level of education and facilitate interaction between the classes. Renhult, Trägårdh, and Ellmin modeled the Stockholm education circle on similar English and German initiatives. Its program was popular, scientific, and basically apolitical. Its members consisted largely of craft journeymen. A few years later, Götrek and Ellmin, together with another tailor, Carl Rudolf Löwstädt, launched the Scandinavian Society, which was accused of advocating communism and subversive activities and dissolved after only one year.Footnote ¹⁵ Craftsmen and journeymen, who had been inspired by Étienne Cabet's and Saint Simon's utopian socialism doctrines (which united communitarian and Christian principles), were a majority of the Society's active members.Footnote ¹⁶ These same enthusiasts were also active in other organizations, such as the Society for the Promotion of Worker Associations, all of which aimed to stimulate and maintain interest in educative pursuits among the workers.

These pioneer efforts were short-lived and did not result in lasting political or trade union institutions. Other more permanent forms of organization did develop during the second half of the nineteenth century, however, including arbetareinstitut (workers’ institutes) and arbetareföreningar (workers’ associations). They were generally “top-down” initiatives. Their goal was primarily to “refine” or “improve” workers so that they could become “mature” enough to participate in politics. Later in the century, some of these associations also sought to encourage friendly relationships between employers and employees and to discourage the growth of independent labor organizations.Footnote ¹⁷ They were all animated by the notion of worker self-help. Through study and the pursuit of “cultivated pleasures,” workers were to develop the capacity to raise themselves out of their social and economic misery. Among other activities, some worker associations also ran consumer cooperatives, credit unions, and pension funds to improve the members’ living conditions.

Inspired by Comte's positivist doctrine, many liberal and radical gentlemen also experimented with educational circles and lectures that could disseminate scientific knowledge and information to all social classes, especially the working class. In keeping with this tradition, Anton Nyström, another physician, started a workers’ institute in 1880 in order to help workers improve the quality of their lives through education.Footnote ¹⁸ Scientific knowledge, including social scientific knowledge independent of all political and religious standpoints, was central to the institute's curriculum. Only educated citizens who understood their obligations, as well as their rights, and who exemplified a new social ethic would be able to build a new society on the basis of scientific truth and understanding. The effort inspired its followers. But many workers and working-class spokesmen criticized Nyström's positivist faith and accused him of not only trying to found a new religion, but also of suppressing workers’ desire to agitate to improve their working conditions and living standards.Footnote ¹⁹

From Utopia to Pragmatism

During the first decades of the mid-1800s the modern Swedish trade union movement lacked a clear ideological identity and oscillated between liberal and socialist (or social democratic) positions. Socialists, led by August Palm, wanted a socialist Sweden. They saw unions as essential constituents of the socialist society of the future and therefore encouraged their organization and growth. The socialists also agitated for universal suffrage, which they saw as critical in order to elect governments that could enact the policy reforms required to create a socialist society.Footnote ²⁰ Liberals, on the other hand, who dominated the movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, believed that the solution to the “labor question” did not lie in a transition to socialism, but in the moral, intellectual, and economic uplift of the working class within a capitalist society. They supported strikes as a last resort but stressed that neither workers nor employers had anything to gain from them. The liberals also insisted that the trade unions should avoid making commitments to a particular political party. The chief aim was to prevent conflicts between labor and capital.Footnote ²¹

The rivalry between the liberal and socialist wings of the labor movement continued from the mid-nineteenth century into the first decades of the twentieth, when the socialists eventually won the argument, at least among a majority of the most active workers, who became staunch supporters of the socialist cause. Palm insisted that the only way for workers to gain the power required to build a socialist society was to unite in a single, large organization, which would function as both a political party and a trade union federation. He characterized such a prospect as “an event of epoch-making significance.”Footnote ²²

After countless contacts, talks, and negotiations with trade union organizations, delegates from all worker organizations and worker-centered associations that supported social democratic principles were invited to a nationwide congress in 1889. There they agreed to found the Social Democratic Workers Party of Sweden (SAP: Sveriges socialdemokratiska arbetareparti). Overall, a total of seventy organizations were represented at the meeting, of which fifty were trade unions. Not all of the unions were willing to affiliate directly with the party, however, and the question of whether the labor movement's political and trade union branches ought to be merged into one organization continued to be debated for several years.

Finally, in 1898, 270 delegates from 24 trade unions representing 50,000 organized Swedish workers met to found an independent national Swedish trade union federation, the Landsorganisationen i Sverige (literally, the National Organization of Sweden, now known as the LO).Footnote ²³ A majority of the delegates then also approved a proposal that all members of the LO automatically become, initially, members of SAP. The arguments that the political and the trade union wings of the labor movement should unite to fight the attacks on freedom of association and universal suffrage proved to be convincing. But the unity was achieved on the basis of two separate organizations.Footnote ²⁴ The LO and the SAP have dominated Sweden's political and social life ever since.

Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund (ABF)—Labor Movement's Educational Movement

The Swedish labor movement cannot be understood without a study of popular education, which was a movement in its own right operating both alongside and within the labor movement. Throughout its history, in fact, the Swedish social democratic labor movement has often seemed to be a huge educational project. During the twentieth century, the socialist labor movement expanded the popular education activities of the nineteenth-century liberal worker institutes and associations to embrace even the lowest rungs of the social hierarchy. Workers from different parts of the labor movement—political associations, trade union clubs, and cooperative societies—came together to educate themselves and exchange life experiences. In these clubs, they came in contact with political and ideological currents of equality, justice, and solidarity; learned the practical application of democratic rules and processes; and developed the ability to organize, lead, and exercise democratic control. Many of the SAP's most prominent politicians and leaders got their first education in trade unions.Footnote ²⁵

Many attempts had been made to bring together all of the labor movement's educational and study activities under one roof. But the passage of the 1912 Library Reform Act accelerated the process. The law stipulated that national organizations that maintained libraries for public use in various parts of the country were eligible for government grants equal to half the cost of their book budget. The legislature intended in this way to encourage the dissemination of knowledge on various useful topics and to “foster and shape viable as well as socially useful citizens.”

The Library Reform Act of 1912 was a milestone in the history of folkbildning in Sweden. The state's involvement helped to create a system of central libraries with branches in almost every municipality, evenly distributed throughout the country. In addition, because the subsidies applied only to nationwide organizations with at least 20,000 members, the law encouraged local educational associations to band together. The first such national educational association was the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF: Arbetarnas bildningsförbund), founded in 1912. It emerged as the rational organizational expression of the already-existing educational work carried out within the labor movement, such as LO, SAP, Cooperative Association, and the Social Democratic Youth League.Footnote ²⁶ These were the constituent members, the “ownership base,” of ABF. Since then the ownership base has expanded, comprising today fifty-nine national civil society organizations, whose common denominator is that they share the values of the labor movement. ABF's foundation confirmed the immense importance of popular education for the realization of a social democratic society, which in theory was “not only based on a system of the highest technical perfection of management,” but also relied on the power of “highly cultured people.”Footnote ²⁷

ABF appealed to all workers regardless of organizational affiliation and was a meeting place for ideological dialogue and cooperation with different points of view. It arose and still operates as an educational “metaorganization” for all labor movement organizations. The formation of ABF answered a real need within the labor movement for a separate educational institution that did not reproduce the ruling bourgeois society. However, the labor movement's various branches did not always coexist harmoniously within the same educational institution and could not be taken for granted. Different opinions existed concerning both organizational structure and educational content.Footnote ²⁸ Despite the power struggle within the ABF between leftist organizations on the one hand, and SAP and LO on the other, however, which the latter won, ABF did not split into competing educational organizations. Instead, it remained open to ideological, political, and subject-related diversity and gave the different organizations within it pedagogical freedom in the arrangement of their study plans.

Almost all education within LO and SAP is organized under the auspices of ABF. This is due in part to the restrictions placed by the state on the financial support it provides for the political and trade union education. From the beginning, state grants were not paid to activities that were considered political or ideological. Only programs that were “free and voluntary”Footnote ²⁹ and met the requirement of objectivity could be funded. The founding of ABF, as well as other educational associations, in effect enabled various political and religious movements to evade these funding restrictions, which were loosened somewhat in the 1960s and 1970s, when grants also could be allocated to “profiled study activities.”Footnote ³⁰ Throughout the period, however, the bonds between the study associations and civil society organizations were recognized as “actively contributing to strengthening and developing democracy in our country.”Footnote ³¹

The LO also conducted part of its internal education under its own management in six so-called LO schools spread across the country. The most famous is Brunnsvik in northern Sweden, which opened as a regular folk high school with a strong labor movement profile in 1906 and six years later hosted the meeting at which the ABF was founded.Footnote ³² In 1929, the LO began to offer its own courses at Brunnsvik. From the point of view of its students, the school's dual function as a folk high school and an LO education center was practically indistinguishable. Many LO members attended both the regular folk high school and LO courses. Brunnsvik became a symbol within the labor movement, held in high regard for providing its branches with well-educated functionaries and devoted activists.Footnote ³³

ABF is today the largest of ten study associations in Sweden and is an essential part of the national infrastructure for lifelong learning, with branches in every municipality across the country. Each local branch is its own legal entity and provides affiliate groups with premises, educational materials, pedagogical advice concerning learning methods, and relevant content. (Affiliating organizations have always been able to specify the objectives of their own education.) ABF is also organized at the regional level in districts, where study circle facilitators and organizers are trained. At the national level, the National Secretariat shoulders the strategic responsibility for the development of the organization, keeps in touch with its partners, analyzes their study needs, and works politically to promote liberal adult education for all citizens. It also pursues an active international agenda.

The most distinctive feature of ABF as a folkbildning organization is its commitment to democracy and to the autonomy of its participants. ABF shares the labor movement's social vision but is otherwise independent and cooperates freely with a wide range of other social movements around common projects. The organization's ethos is captured by its ideological principles, which underscore its profile as “a radical idea movement.”Footnote ³⁴ It also fully shares the official state view on the importance of popular adult education. The ABF conducts its study activities on the basis of a broad commitment to equality, solidarity, and democracy. In accordance with those principles, it seeks to promote social transformation consistent with the fundamental values of the labor movement; to educate the members of the affiliated organizations for missions in associations, the working life, and society; and to create the conditions for participation and freedom of choice in education and cultural life for all citizens. Following is its most recent “program of ideas”:

The Labor Movement in Government—Social Democracy and the Swedish Model

After an intense period marked by frequent strikes and violent conflict, the Swedish political and trade movement emerged as the dominant factor in the political life of the country.Footnote ³⁶ It did so by gradually instilling in its membership a new reformist, social democratic political culture, oriented toward cooperation, pragmatism, compromise, equality, and modernization, which enjoyed massive grassroots support across the nation. The labor movement in effect wrested the project of modernization from the non-Socialist parties and launched the largest social transformation in modern Swedish history. It also put its own stamp upon this project by linking it to the building within Sweden of a folkhem—a “people's home.”Footnote ³⁷ Neither the widespread support for the project nor its realization would have been possible without the labor movement's intense and persistent popular education work among its rank-and-file and the population at large.

Its efforts were so successful that the Social Democratic Party (SAP) governed Sweden continuously from 1932 to 1976, the longest mandate ever given a working-class party in the West. During this period, it enjoyed almost total ideological hegemony over a wide array of Swedish social institutions. The decisive event in the consolidation of the SAP's power was, without doubt, the landmark agreement between the LO and the Swedish Employers’ Federation (SAF) in Saltsjöbaden in 1938. As a result of this “historic compromise,” labor and capital pledged to resolve any of their future difference through negotiations. The Saltsjöbaden agreement was a concrete manifestation of the labor movement's decision to opt for peaceful industrial and social reforms instead of revolution and violent upheavals.Footnote ³⁸ It confirmed the labor movement's hegemonic position in Swedish society and underlined the legitimacy of the Social Democratic welfare state project—the folkhem—as an overriding interest.

In the 1960s, the post-World War Two spirit of social consensus was strained in new ways, as migration and internationalization increased. Technological change also altered the conditions of production and demanded new skills. New radical social forces, which were less interested in economic growth than in the need for personal integrity and self-realization, also entered the political arena. The demand for adult education programs grew. New laws required nine years of compulsory schooling and expanded access of upper-secondary education. Targeting society's “talent pool,” the goal of these reforms was to provide an adequate supply of skilled workers to meet the needs of a changing labor market. While education in general was still intended to promote individual and social development as well as economic growth, adult education in particular was justified as a way to ensure the equitable distribution of educational opportunities.Footnote ³⁹ In response to these changes, the LO and ABF initiated many adult education reforms in the late 1960s, which were encouraged and supported by the social democratic government, including funding for outreach activities to educationally disadvantaged adults, many of whom were immigrants.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Swedish labor movement and its social democratic folkhem project continued to make gains in the early 1970s. The 1973 elections resulted in a 50–50 split between the socialist and bourgeois parties in Parliament. Even so, an impressive series of prolabor laws were enacted, including employee representation on company boards,Footnote ⁴¹ enhanced powers for safety stewards, and tighter rules on layoffs and firings.Footnote ⁴² The Act on Co-determination (MBL) passed in 1976 further strengthened the union's positioning in relation to employers.Footnote ⁴³ It also represented the high-water mark of postwar Swedish social democracy. In the mid-1970s, the employers' federation orchestrated and financed a fierce campaign against what it viewed as a bloated public sector and called for the restoration of market forces. The campaign was sparked, in part, by a proposal for “wage-earner funds” (löntagarfonder), financed by a tax on “excess profits,” which were to be under the control of the unions.Footnote ⁴⁴ The SAF's attacks proved successful, and the SAP lost its Parliamentary majority in 1976, the first time in forty-four years, paving the way for tax cuts, the selling off of state enterprises, and the extensive deregulation of business and the financial sector.

In response to the employers’ offensive, the SAP and the unions began to conduct extensive internal membership education. The party's efforts focused on reminding members, especially new ones, of the history of the social democratic movement and its ideology. According to Tomas Eneroth, a group leader of the social democratic parliamentary group, head of SAP's internal education, and a member of the ABF executive committee, “a social democrat must know why he/she is a Social Democrat.”Footnote ⁴⁵ There was also a growing awareness of the importance of ensuring that the SAP was “a learning organization,” not least because of the experience of recent years, in order to strengthen the quality of the meaningful and competent membership:

SAP member education, even though it is by definition political education, continues to be conducted in cooperation with the ABF and LO.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Eneroth observed, organizational development and the internal education go hand in hand. The aim of the SAP's internal education today is not primarily to focus on developing a cadre of functionaries. It is to live up to the party's popular movement tradition by empowering all members. In particular, membership education tries to reach those who have only just joined the party and may have only just moved to the country. The SAP's leadership believes that it is vital that they familiarize themselves with the Swedish popular movement model and with the country's political culture. They seek create a common frame of reference for all members, and for that to happen continuing educational work has to become a strategic concern for the Social Democratic Party. To assist with this effort the SAP has coordinated many of its study courses with the LO and ABF, folk high schools, and other labor movement-owned training facilities, such as Bommersviksakademin.Footnote ⁴⁸

At present, the outcome of this effort is still unclear. The SAP has regained neither its clear majority in Parliament nor its social mandate. Political power in Sweden is for now precariously balanced between the liberal and the social democratic parties, while a growing number of voters are supporting the so-called Swedish Democrats, a right-wing, an anti-immigrant political formation which threatens all that the SAP has fought for over the last century.

The Swedish Labor Movement: A Matter of Education

The history of the Swedish labor movement is the narrative of a poor agrarian country's remarkable transformation into a modern, high-tech welfare state with well-functioning institutions and a transparent democratic system. Sweden's social infrastructure of opportunities is inclusive and creates the sheltered basis for all citizens’ free development. This structure of opportunities rests on solidarity tax and redistribution policies that take into account people's differences based on the principle of all humans’ equal value. The values of the labor movement appealed to far more citizens than just those who belonged to the working class, thereby creating a broad-based social contract. The contribution of popular education in general, and of ABF in particular, to the creation of modern Sweden is undisputed and widely recognized.

Folkbildning in Sweden developed in the wake of industrialism and was practiced in a very specific context marked by its history, cultural traditions, fixed power relations, and—not least—geographical and environmental conditions. Meeting, learning, and socializing in study circles proved to reflect a genuine Swedish pattern of social communication; it was neither too intimate nor too formal: it is lagom, “just right.” Olof Palme, in a speech at the 1969 Congress of the Social Democratic Party, described Swedish political culture as follows:

The Swedish “study circle democracy” is a country where “everyone can participate,” a country were dreams find room to grow real. Thus, the country's current minister of education, Aida Hadzialic, who came to Sweden as a refugee with her parents from the Bosnian War in the late 1990s, has observed:

Without the contributions of Swedish popular education and folkbilding, there might not have been a “freedom dream.” At the very least, it would be a very different dream, indeed.