Cultural sustainability: a hidden curriculum in Swedish home economics?

Abstract

The school subject home economics (HE) provides education on food, meals, and sustainability. Drawing on observations and interviews with eight Swedish HE teachers during 2018, this paper conceptualizes HE as an ambiguous perceived space between the conceived space of state-controlled learning goals and the lived space of a traditional Swedish, feminine, middle-class home. The subject’s focus on cooking and housework lowered its status and marginalized it from the rest of the school. It seemed in constant threat of neglect and dissipation, which together with the chaotic nature of student cooking gave rise to a need for order and control. This extended to norms surrounding food, cooking, and eating that blurred the line between knowledge content and value judgments. Based on these findings, I suggest that HE is permeated not only by the social, ecological, and economic sustainability perspectives of the syllabus but also a fourth–cultural sustainability–which is not explicitly defined but rather underpins the subject in the form of a hidden curriculum.