This open issue of Confero presents four essays that all relate to questions of education and power. Laila Nielsen and Ralph Leighton compare how conditions of citizenship regarding ethnicity, gender, and social class are understood, based on interviews with teachers and students in upper secondary schools in England and Sweden. The second essay is written by Rasoul Nejadmehr who gives a thorough account of the "scientific education" as the dominant educational paradigm of the present. Through a historical analysis, Nejadmehr shows how this paradigm is deeply embedded with racial, colonial, and Eurocentric biases. The third essay by Marcus Samuelsson analyzes offical and unofficial inspections of the classroom that takes place when authorities conduct audits, but also when pupils post videos on social media. In the fourth essay of this issue, Tomas Wedin discusses changes in the Swedish school during the period of 1946-2000.