Framtidsskaparna : Vetenskapens ungdomskultur vid svenska läroverk 1930-1970

Sammanfattning: This dissertation analyzes scientific youth culture at Swedish secondary grammar schools during an era when the faith in science, technology and progress was strong. The aim is to study the production of meaning among the students and the everyday practices they were involved in.The students of the secondary grammar schools were involved in a character-building and educative process and they often described themselves as an elite among the youth of the nation. In addition to this, the students of the natural sciences described themselves as future leaders, mainly because they took science and technology to be the most modern and rational school subjects.The science students did extra-curricular laboratory work, excursions and longer journeys. I argue that the participants fostered each other in the ability to perform scientific observations through these practices. The students often described a certain set of norms and ideals that made an activity ”scientific”. In order to be a scientist they had to live up to the collective scientific norms of precision and exactness as well as to the hard-working and altruistic ideal of the individual heroes of science.In conclusion this dissertation studies how scientific norms, ideals and world views got shaped and reshaped in a local scientific culture. It shows how young scientists taught each other that science was a modern, objective, male, visionary, and rule governed activity.