In recent decades education has been suggested as an important solution to current problems of the population?s health. A high level of education in general is construed as essential for the nation?s well-being and competitiveness. In this article we problematise the ways in which discourses on education, learning and health have become interlinked. Drawing on a post-structural theorisation inspired by Michel Foucault, we analyse Swedish policy documents on education and public health and direct our attention to how the healthy citizen is shaped and fostered. We illustrate how the healthy citizen emerges in opposition to the non-healthy, non-desirable and abnormal citizen. Citizens are made responsible for identifying their deficits and suggesting solutions. Governing techniques, such as motivational interviews and physical activity on prescription, operates in order to shape such citizens. Through these techniques, a confessional relation emerges, where citizens are invited to disclose their deficits and problems and in so doing shape themselves in a desired way.

Contemporary understandings about the importance of a ‘desirable population’ have become intimately related to the pursuit of education and lifelong learning. In order to enable this, higher education operates as a technology for shaping desirable citizens. This paper focuses on a project in Sweden that aimed to include students with intellectual disabilities in higher education. Drawing on Foucault’s notion on governmentality and subjectivity, the analytical focus is on which kinds of subjects are created in and emerge from the project’s policy documents. The prospective students emerge as different and in need of special measures and are assigned particular knowledge that creates expectations and opportunities for them to regulate and foster themselves as desirable subjects in spaces where governing techniques such as surveillance and confession operate. Rather than including these students, the measures instead lead to further exclusion by creating, manifesting and reproducing the otherness it was supposed to counteract.

This article explores how the well-being of the Swedish population has become a joint responsibility in the mission to shape desirable and proper citizens. This is done by studying an organisation called Generation Pep (GEN-PEP), which was established as a measure to foster a well-functioning population both now and in the future. The article draws on a post-structural and discursive theorisation inspired by the work of Michel Foucault and his concept of governmentality, with the specific aims of studying how GEN-PEP functions as a biopolitical strategy aimed at fostering a desirable population and identifying governing techniques mobilised within and through the project. The population is described as having failed to function well and that this should be remedied by creating measures that are indirectly aimed at children as future useful citizens. The measures are legitimised by highlighting the population’s ill-health. As a result of ‘experts’ and national role models telling these truths, the governing reflects the idea that a power similar to sovereign power needs to be re-established, where e.g. philanthropists contribute to and enable the project’s strategies and measures. The measures taken are described as a mutual responsibility, with parents being made especially responsible for correcting faults in accordance with the suggested solutions. GEN-PEP functions as a biopolitical strategy in which corporations, philanthropists and celebrities are encouraged to work together to improve the well-being of the nation.

This article focus on how the Swedish population is shaped into desirable citizens as resources for the nation’s prosperity. The aim is to analyse how health operates as a governing technique in discourses of lifelong learning. Within such current discourses the population is today described as generally well-educated and healthy, but not educated or healthy enough. When constructed as being in need of enhancement, measures of learning are suggested for regulating certain groups of the population into becoming what is regarded as desirable. Making use of Foucault’s notions of governmentality and genealogy, white and green papers from the Ministry of Health and Social Affairs from 1930s and today (2017) are analysed. The analysis shows that although the population is described as having different problems originating from ignorance, the solutions that are suggested in the different time periods are basically the same. The relation between learning and health is described in different ways in the 1930s and the present. In the 1930s learning is explained merely as a means to achieve a healthy population while in the present health is described both as a prerequisite and as an effect of learning. Further, there is also a difference in how the governing is conducted.