The last decades have seen a grooving insight in the need of development towards a sustainable society. This manifests in several political statements but also reveals the problem with realization. In this study we investigate how the concept of education in sustainable development is presented in steering documents for the Swedish upper secondary school and especially the national technology programme. This choice of programme is made because its content easily can be connected to the three categories in sustainable development: environment, social and economic issues. Another perspective that has became current in the educational system in Sweden and also manifested in political documents is Entrepreneurship. Inspired by both discourse analysis and by Bourdieu’s theories about social practices in society we have studied the Swedish national steering documents for the technology programme out from writings of sustainable development and entrepreneurship. The result is remarkable in that even if writings about sustainable development exist, they get more diminished and less committing the closer you get to the actual teaching situation. In documents, that steer and signals especial values for teaching in the programme, we find interesting diverges in statements. Sustainable development seems to be valued lower compared with for example entrepreneurship and product development for economic growth. Both sustainable development and entrepreneurship are highlighted in the steering documents and a political aim is to connect them, but it is interesting to see how different they are emphasized in the different documents especially in the more concrete course syllabi. One
conclusion can be that Sweden on an international level has ambitions to be seen as a nation taking responsibility for the future but has not been able to transmit this into action in the educational system.
In Sweden the importance of sustainable development (SD) can be traced in political documents from the fundamental law down to the curriculum for different school levels. To investigate how this political objective is demonstrated in knowledge and activities among the teachers, eleven upper secondary school teachers from different subjects have been interviewed to map out their views of SD, their own beliefs and how they teach SD. The interviews have been analysed in terms of content with the Knowledge – Value – Practice model as theoretical frame. The results showed that among the interviewed teachers there existed a spectrum of views of what SD stands for, from a narrow view to a well-developed view. There were also differences in their teaching practice. All teachers stated that teaching for SD is of great importance and that they all did it in terms of their own personal definition. All of them also pointed out that even if the steering documents present SD as important, the local management of the issue is weak. The differences between the teachers’ view of SD and the weak local management generate a fundamental problem. Depending on the teachers’ own definition and content choice the pupils may get different content knowledge, perhaps not even consistent with the recognized definition of sustainable development. The schools cannot therefore be said to give the pupils an equal education in the area of SD.