Between human capital and human worth

Abstract

This study concerns the history of Swedish public everyday discourse about knowledge and its benefits for the individual, c. 1920-1974. We examine the value(s) ascribed to knowledgein economic and/or idealistic termsusing private correspondence institutes as our point of departure. These were immensely popular, yet have hitherto been overlooked by historians. First, we argue that commercially driven correspondence education, which was a mass phenomenon in early and mid-20 th-century Sweden, blurred the demarcation lines between general and vocational education, and more importantly between formal and so-called popular education (folkbildning). Second, we examine how knowledge and education were promoted and justified in the widely circulated advertisements for Hermods Korrespondensinstitut, the largest of the Swedish correspondence schools. By analysing and contextualizing advertisements over six decades, we find a strong dominance of individualistic economic valuations from the beginning, a successive increase in idealistic valuations over the decades, and an increasing amalgamation of idealistic and economic justifications for knowledge. We argue that the extensive scale of Hermods' and similar institutes' educational activities offers an important key for understanding the social context in which the overall marketization and capitalization of knowledge in the latest decades was able to take root.

The technicians of consumer society: the creation of advertising men and practical advertising knowledge in early twentieth-century Sweden

“…In the period 1939 to 1948, a total of nearly 700,000 new students registered at Hermods, and by that time, the company already had a few significant competitors with thousands of students of their own. It is important to point out that compared to the USA, for example, correspondence schools in Sweden were respected providers of education (Gadd en, 1973, p. 221;Husz and Glover, 2019).…”

“…In addition to being the first in Sweden to offer a comprehensive education in the field of advertising, they were also major advertisers themselves and very well known to the public. Large, conspicuous advertisements for correspondence courses were widely published in newspapers and popular magazines, which attracted attention but also led to criticism that the ads were misleading as they promised too much in terms of prospects for success in life (Husz and Glover, 2019, p. 500). In the introduction to Hermods’ advertising course in 1937–38 (the first 12 letters were printed in 1937, the rest in 1938), there is a reference to the value of the school’s own advertising, claiming that advertising was a key factor behind its popularity and the reason why Hermods had become “Scandinavia’s largest school” (Hermods Reklamteknik, 1937, introductory letter, p. 1) [1].…”

Bortom vänstervind och högervåg

“…Även marknaden krävde social ingenjörskonst, och välfärdsstatens aktörer i form av såväl näringsliv som folkrörelser var i högsta grad inblandade i att "göra" marknad. 19 Att betona liknande mönster av kontinuitet betyder inte att förminska konsekvenserna av marknadens tid. Tvärtom blir frågan om bevekelsegrunder, legitimitet och de framtidsförväntningar som skrevs in i marknadens löften ännu viktigare i ljuset av vår kunskap idag om deras effekter.…”

Doing Business in the Schools of the Welfare State: Competing “Entrepreneurial Selves” and the Roots of Entrepreneurship Education in 1980s Sweden

“…26 There are studies on the movement's role in education in Sweden, but these generally concern the period before the 1970s and other kinds of educational efforts, such as correspondence schools, which offered a wide variety of courses, or classes on democracy. 27…”