Democracy – if it’s comfortable

The Swedish curriculum for the upper secondary school has been through a major change in the new corriculom that came in 2011 together with the new law concerning the Swedish schoolsystem (SFS 2010:800). The process behind these documents has been the main purpose and goal of this study. This has taken the form of a discourse analysis of all the material that led to the making of the current curriculum and the law concerning the Swedish school system. The discourse analysis looked after mechanisms of exclusion in both the process and the finished products of the two documents and also focused to see if there were any ethnocentric features present. The result shows that the curriculum together with the Swedish law concerning the school system is in a paradoxical relationship where Swedish teachers have to be inclusive in the pupils right to express different opinions, and at the same time be exclusive as only democratic values as is tradition in the west are to be accepted. At the same time there are some ethnocentric features present regarding how these democratic values should be thought, as it says it should follow western humanism and Christian ethics and values. These paradoxical and ethnocentric elements who are found within these documents show that some people may be excluded and that teachers may have to sacrifice either the students right to express themselves or their cultural differences or sacrifice the core values from whom the teachers are forced to abide to