Konfessionella friskolors vara eller icke-vara : En kvalitativ textanalys av den mediala debatten om konfessionella friskolor

The religious landscape in Sweden has changed in recent years as a result of secularization processes, individualization, and migration. This has led to religion occupying new places in society and one such place is media. The visibility of religion in the media creates space for debate about what role religion should play in different context, which in this thesis applies to school. Since 2018, there has been a debate in the media regarding the being or non-being of independent confessional schools. This bachelor thesis aims to examine the arguments that appear in the criticism versus the defense of independent confessional schools in debate articles in Sweden. Debate articles from the Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Aftonbladet and Expressen are examined with qualitative text analysis. The result shows that the most common arguments among those who want to ban independent confessional schools are: religious indoctrination, segregation, and extremism. From the other side of the debate are the ones who defend independent confessional schools and the most common arguments from this side are: freedom of religion, corresponds to the Swedish curriculum, and integration. Further, an additional aim is to analyze how the debate can be understood using the theoretical concepts of narrative, institutional and cultural transformation processes in mediatization theory. The analysis shows that there are signs of these transformation processes in the debate articles. Many of the debate articles on the ban side are structured according to media logics where one perspective is set against another to provoke reactions from the readers, which expresses the narrative transformation process. The institutional transformation process is reflected in how actors from different institutions communicate in the debate, where political actors control the debate and religious actors adapt accordingly. The cultural transformation process is made visible by seeing how the debate relates to the surrounding society which is characterized by secular norms on one hand and increased religious diversity on the other.