The scientisation of literacy education and the fantasy of governable literacy

Abstract Across contemporary education policy, science and evidence are increasingly invoked as authoritative grounds for educational reform. This article examines how scientific authority is constructed and mobilised within literacy policy through a comparative analysis of three Swedish Government Official Reports underpinning reforms of compulsory schooling, teacher education, and the national curriculum. Drawing on discourse-theoretical policy analysis, the study traces how references to science and related forms of scientific rationality are connected to particular understandings of literacy development, teaching, assessment, and professional practice. The analysis identifies three distinct but complementary patterns. In the compulsory school reform, literacy development is made increasingly visible through systematic mapping, assessment, and early intervention. In the teacher education reform, scientific authority is linked more directly to evidence-based instructional methods and professional competence. In the curriculum reform, this logic extends into the organisation of knowledge, teaching strategies, and assessment. Across the three cases, these developments accumulate into a broader policy formation in which literacy is increasingly constructed as an object that can be identified, monitored, predicted, and directed through scientifically authorised forms of knowledge and intervention. We conceptualise the promise that literacy development can thereby be rendered increasingly knowable, predictable, and amenable to intervention as a fantasy of governable literacy . The article argues that this development concerns not simply the growing authority of science in literacy education, but a particular construction of literacy itself as an increasingly knowable and governable educational object. The study contributes to research on the scientisation of education by showing how scientific authority can operate across different reform arenas without relying on a single, stable definition of what counts as science.