Lgr 11's Postcolonial Burden of History

AbstractIn 2011, the Swedish government created a new curriculum for the compulsory school. This curriculum included stricter guidelines about what was to be taught in a variety of subjects taught in public and many private schools. This policy, entitled Lgr 11, has potential to influence a generation or more of Swedes regarding their understanding of the postcolonial world and future dealings with that part of the world and its peoples. In this paper, elements of postmodern and postcolonial historiography is employed when analyzing Lgr 11’s history syllabus. How the postcolonial world and its histories are represented in Lgr 11‘s narrative(s) is investigated. The importance of this document to Swedes is that, with a significant proportion of the Swedish population recent immigrants from the postcolonial world, the perspectives of that region are important in the development of identity for recent immigrants, Swedes themselves and in understandings of a large portion of the world for less recent immigrant Swedes. Swedish identity now includes postcolonial histories