The Folk high School as Seismograph. Sociological perspectives on the contemporary educational offerings of Swedish folk high schools 1952-2018

For over 150-years, folk high schools (FHS) have been an integral part of the educational landscapes in the Nordics, gradually transforming their provision and program offerings as society modernized.

The aim of this project is to use program descriptions of FHS as heuristic objects for understanding how these schools have presented and legitimized themselves during the postwar period: 1954-2018.

During this period of intense educational reforms, the FHS has become increasingly diversified and started to cater its programs to a wide array of social groups.

By tracing how different themes have emerged as important in FHS educational offerings and how they built their legitimacy against the backdrop of heightened institutional competition and societal transformations, we unravel the seismographic function of FHS programs. The project design consists of three phases.

First, we digitize annual reports from FHS providers and integrate them into an existing repository based on FHS catalogs.

Secondly, we conduct large-scale analyses using texts and images from this database in order to identify how different themes and values have been propagated among the Swedish FHS.

Thirdly, we synthesize these findings and compare them to the developments in FHS in Germany and Denmark as well as other educational institutions.

The project will generate a valuable educational resource and provide new sociological insight into the postwar transformations of a century-old Nordic institution.