With respect to the relation between group ties and democracy, this paper focuses how different types of pedagogies and teaching contexts lead to different expressions of solidarity between students. In one public school with a music profile, the middle-class students experience a strong group connection (‘tightness’ is the word frequently used by the students), which fuels robust interpersonal relations and a strong degree of openness between the individuals in the group; however, this loyalty to group members does not lead to solidarity across group boundaries. Solidarity as expressed in the Swedish curriculum is a much broader social, democratic attitude. The results shows that learning through group work and thematic studies does not seem to provide the conditions for solidarity either; instead, it fosters weak relations in the group since often one or two persons in the group take entire responsibility for getting the work done. In relation to goals of the national curriculum to foster solidarity, this is an interesting and troublesome result pointing at the need for making the normative dimensions of curriculum explicit in pedagogical practice as opposed to being merely a regulatory ideal.