Medelklassens kulturella ideal : En WPR-analys av statens läspolitik för barn och unga

Sammanfattning: This study is a qualitative text analysis of the state's public inquiry (SOU 2018:57) according to Carol Bacchi's (2009) Foucault-influenced analysis tool: "What's the Problem Represented to be?" (WPR) which is based in poststructuralist theory. The policy's incentives are the international measurements of fourth-grade and 15-year-olds' reading comprehension, PIRLS and PISA respectively. Quantitative measurements in large population groups are generally stated as motives for initiating policies in contemporary welfare states. The starting point in this study is class as class aspects tend to be toned down in today's society despite the fact that parents' level of education has an approximately as strong connection with basic reading skills and in the long run school results as with the variables gender and Swedish/foreign background together. Based on class the purpose of the study is to investigate how the state's public inquiry, which addresses all children's and young people's reading, assumes that the spread of reading comprehension has increased for decades between socioeconomic groups of children and young people in Sweden alongside with school segregation. The conclusion is that the policy's represented "problem" is a decreasing reading interest in all student groups including the middle class which can affect personal finances and Sweden's position in competition between OECD-countries. The "problem" is furthermore that not all parents have similar resources or attitudes to their children's reading comprehension and reading habits, basically culture and education, as the ideal middle class parent. According to the WPR method "problem" representations within policies result in effects for people, and thus a large share of the population: the group of children, young people and their parents who are highlighted in the study tend, from the position from which the policy is produced, "the bourgeois gaze", to disappear and at the same time to be singled out through the neoliberal and neo-philantrophic discourses that underpins it.