It is widely recognized that the Swedish educational landscape has undergone major changes in the past three decades. In fact, Sweden is now commonly referred to as having the most de-regulated school system in the world. The change of the educational landscape has taken place together with a general transformation of the entire welfare system in Sweden, guided by neoliberal ideology in which decentralization and marketization were core features. This restructuring was launched in the early nineties with competition, privatization, accountability, and school choice as steering mechanisms aiming for quality improvement and efficiency.

In this paper, we grapple with our personal experiences of this development by investigating how this educational capitalism have permeated our minds, focusing on the feeling of school-market-anxiety, which we both have experienced in our role as parents. We aim to share, critically analyze, and put into context some of the experiences we have had of being approached as consumers of education for our own children and the affective dimensions of these experiences. When writing this paper, we both merged and compared our different experiences in a style inspired by the feminist premise that the personal is political, and that awareness-rising of ideological oppression can emerge from sharing and discussing personal experiences. We do this by critically compare notes of urban parenting in late capitalist educational landscape in the Swedish cities Gothenburg and Malmö, inspired by an autoethnographical methodology (Reed-Danahay, 2009). The purpose here is to understand and make sense of our feelings of anxiety as inherently shaped by a neutralization of capitalist ideology (see e.g., Bauman, 1999). We specifically lean on the work of Mark Fischer (2009), Slavoj Žižek (2008), Jason Glyson (2021), and Matthew Clarke (2020) to critically examine the seemingly neutral state of unconscious parental anxiety in late capitalism. To put our work in a critical (post-)Marxist terminology we are particularly interested in understanding how we, as parents of school children, are ‘interpellated’ (Althusser, 1971) by the ideology supporting the current reality of late capitalist education.

Our question throughout this paper is: How can school-market-anxiety, from the perspective of parents’ experiences, be conceptualized as a manifestation of ideology, what consequences can be discerned and what can we do about it? We argue for the need of critical concepts from a psychoanalytical (post-)Marxist tradition that can help us understand – and resist – the increasingly strong grip that a that a capitalist ideology has on contemporary Swedish education and its different actors, and increasingly, throughout all Nordic countries.

Both of us have an academic background in critical education studies, and we have previously published on the marketization of education. However, in our previous attempts to understand marketization we have neglected parents’ school-market-anxiety, and our own role as prospective consumers of education within the late modern educational capitalism of Sweden.