Democracy and Social Inequalities in the Organization of Education During the COVID-19 Pandemic: The Case of Brazil and Sweden

Challenges that arise during a time of crisis, as the current COVID-19 pandemic, are a basis for recognizing how different governments handle the governance of units such as schools and issues related to democracy and social inequality. By paying attention to similar or contrasting issues in the political welfare states’ characteristics and organization, the crisis's impact on different countries can be identified and can provide learning examples beyond the study's phenomena. Although Brazil and Sweden are historically and culturally diverse countries, they also share similarities in being politicized by global trends such as neoliberalism. The paper examines the two governments’ discourses and how centralization, decentralization, and neoliberalism and the resulting shift to privatized public services can form a basis for understanding declines in democracy and social inequality in education in both countries. The following research question guides the work, how are democracy and social inequality expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic? To investigate how democracy and social inequality were expounded in Brazil’s and Sweden’s way of organizing education during the COVID-19 pandemic, we used a quantitative ethnographic approach to analyze the governments’ discourses. With quantitative ethnographic techniques we identified how the states organized discussions and actions to investigate and solve socio-educational issues related to democracy and how access to resources for education related to inequalities. The governmental intensity of keeping the economy functioning was observed to be influenced by the advance of neoliberalism in both countries. In organizing the education during the COVID-19 pandemic, neoliberalism is pertaining to authoritarianism in Brazil and more culturally contingent actions related to the ethos - “openness” - in Sweden.