The worker's dream of becoming an engineer

This article will discuss the dream of many young Swedish men from the working class to become engineers by way of night classes and correspondence courses. This was a culturally and economically important part of the “Swedish model” of modernisation and technical change. The article consists of three parts. In the first, the construction of the dream is analysed via ads and folders which from the 1930s to the 1960s and with varying arguments tried to entice young workers to study their way out of their class. In the second, the ideology and reality of the “triumph of ability” via correspondence courses is analysed with the help of Claus Offe's notion of the “performance principle”, and its gendered contents is discussed. In the final part, the dream is set within the social‐democratic vision of social mobility through education as a means to a modern and class‐less society.