Explaining Secularization: Evidence from the Swedish School Inspectorate
P10-S247-1
Presented by: Johannes Lindvall
Many administrative functions that are now performed by secular government agencies were once performed by religious officials. The transfer of political authority from churches, ecclesiastical orders, and religious associations to secular administrative organizations is a key aspect of secularization---a major social transformation in Western European societies that started in the early-modern period and gained momentum in the late eighteenth century. This paper examines the secularization of primary education in Sweden between the middle of the nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth by analyzing the composition of the country's national school inspectorate. We collected detailed biographical data on every individual school inspector in Sweden between 1861 and 1958 and matched them with data on the geographical areas they served. Our main goal is to understand when and why political decision-makers appointed school inspectors with professional educational backgrounds versus those with ties to the national church. We show that the process of secularization was gradual (it did not happen all at once) and uneven (it did not happen at the same time, or in the same manner, across the country). Most notably, we find that the rise of social movements such as religious nonconformism and trade unionism was associated with a delay in secularization. In regions where these movements gained strength, political decision-makers were more inclined to appoint school inspectors affiliated with the national church rather than professional educators. Conservative Christian political leaders sought to use the school inspectorate as an instrument to counteract the influence of emerging social movements.
Keywords: secularization, schools, Sweden, political history