Political Activism in School? : A Discourse Analysis of School Strike for Climate by Greta Thunberg

A few weeks before the Swedish election in September 2018, a young girl named Greta Thunberg decidedto leave school every Friday and instead sit outside the Swedish parliament in Stockholm to raise awarenessabout the climate. This “school strike for climate” has since then developed to be a world-wide phenomenonand on the 15th of March more than 1.4 million youngsters participated in more than 100 countries.However, these actions have been subject of lots of debate in media; Greta being both cherished andcriticized. Framed within the questions about what motivates the political participation and in what way theschool takes a stand, this thesis aims to analyze “school strike for climate” in relation to the role of bothknowledge and fostering in the Swedish school. Through theories of street-level bureaucracy and politicalparticipation, accompanied by Carol Bacchis discourse perspective what´s the problem represented to be the studyexamines 32 Swedish newspaper articles. The result is a variety of problem representations, getting legitimized through law or moral, but also through a representation which hold both school and the pupils responsible for result in school. One of thedevelopments in the discourse is that during time and enlarging of the political activism, the youngster’sactions more and more is characterized as political participation than of an individual choice. This alsomeans that schools have to take a stand up on an organizational level, where many principals refer to schoolattendance and the law. When political activism is legislated through the curriculum it seems to be adidactical choice by the teachers, whom within their free space as professional street-level bureaucrats mayhave varying opportunities to use the theme within their teaching. Over all, the discourse focus more uponthe climate than democratic ideals, which suggests an unused potential of “school strike for climate” incivic´s education