In recent years, Swedish teacher education has come under scrutiny as policymakers seek to raise the status of the profession. Since 2021, universities have been authorized to set specific admission criteria for teacher education programs, including recent proposals to require a minimum grade of C in Swedish (SOU 2024:81). These changes reflect broader concerns about declining teacher competence and societal anxieties about the profession’s ability to meet its demands. At the same time, they raise questions about how the concept of teacher suitability is constructed, governed, and tied to societal desires.  

This paper addresses these questions by providing a genealogy of teacher suitability discourses in Sweden from 1842 to 2024. Drawing on the theories of Foucault (1991) and Hacking (2002), it examines how selection requirements have historically regulated teacher subjectivities, producing individuals who are both docile to institutional norms and desirable to societal aspirations. Through an analysis of policy documents, government reports, teacher guidelines, the study traces how moral, professional, and meritocratic discourses have shaped the processes of defining and assessing teacher suitability in Sweden. 

Preliminary results show that when Sweden’s compulsory school system was introduced in 1842, teacher suitability was grounded in religiously inspired moral values. Suitability was articulated through religiously inspired notions of virtue and sin. The teacher, as a figure of ‘moral purity’, was tasked with embodying Christian ideals (Dahm, 1846). This moral regime sought not only to discipline teachers but also to use them as tools for disciplining society, positioning them as mediators of the state’s moral aspirations. 

By the mid-20th century, teacher suitability shifted towards professionalization and meritocratic ideals. Suitability became tied to the teacher’s observable performance and professional behavior as assessed by entrance examinations, interviews, and pre-practice requirements (SOU 1952:33; SOU 1975:67). These techniques also fabricated a specific kind of teacher subjectivity – one that embodied the dual imperatives of individual merit and professional conformity. The discourse of suitability thus shifted from explicit moral authority to the subtler forms of conformity to professional norms and institutional practices. Teachers were no longer seen as just moral figures but as technicians, expected to meet the societal demands for expertise. 

The most recent proposal to require a minimum grade of C in Swedish (SOU 2024:81) exemplifies how meritocratic ideals are reinscribed into suitability discourses, constructing a ‘floor’ beneath which one cannot fall. Hidden behind meritocratic arguments, language requirements are presented as an important yet neutral criterion of teacher competence. At the same time, this form of ‘linguistic meritocracy’ exemplifies how teachers are increasingly governed through performance metrics, which are believed to be objective. 

Overall, our analysis demonstrates how institutional and societal desires are inscribed in the very processes that make up the people who are meant to serve them. The teacher, as a subject of both discipline and desire, is shaped through societal fears and desires and the intersecting discourses of morality, expertise and effectiveness.