Schooling and State Formation in Early Modern Sweden by Bengt Sandin

Sandin's dissertation made a key contribution to the first wave of the so-called new history of education, which questioned previous celebratory accounts of progress and instead critically examined the relationship between education and society. In the introduction to his dissertation, Sandin clearly positioned himself by introducing American revisionists to the Swedish field, acknowledging Michael Katz, Carl Kaestle, David Tyack, and the aforementioned Bowles and Gintis. The introductory chapter also contained a healthy dose of Michel Foucault's analysis of discipline. As a result of this updated theoretical framework and the extensive empirical exploration of early modern schooling that stemmed from this, Sandin's dissertation remains a self-evident reference for Swedish research on early modern as well as nineteenth-century schooling.