Technology as the language of schooling: utopian visions of technology in Swedish general education in the 1960s

In the state-of-the-art Glass Project run by the Swedish National Agency for Education during the second half of the 1960s, a new type of comprehensive technology education was developed. The project had little impact on school practice and was soon forgotten about. However, the project is interesting from several points of view. First, it elaborated an interesting curricular idea where school activities were to centre around technology, thus creating a meaningful whole for the pupils, a sort of “language of schooling”. Second, the Glass Project illustrates a utopian logic of educational reform. The school had become an important area of reform in the mid-twentieth century, and in this the pedagogy of the “old school” was heavily criticised. Technology education clearly became a tool for progressive ideas in Sweden in the 1960s.