This article highlights the political nature of literacy development and the roleand tasks of the school subject ‘Swedish’ and the teaching of ‘Swedish’ incompulsory school. We argue that literacy practices are inherently ideologicaland claim that literacy success goes beyond literacy experiences and earlyschool instruction and therefore cannot be looked upon as tasks only for thelanguage arts syllabus. Our argument is that every child’s right to developliteracy is an essential part of the fundamental democratic mission that theeducational system has and that failures in literacy acquisition therefore can-not be considered as matters to be attended to by remedial education.We alsoclaim that the repeated cycles of ‘literacy crises’ have little or nothing to do withliteracy achievement in individuals or groups of students. We rather considerthem as symptoms of a social and educational incapacity to deal with morecomplex questions such as equality, participation and democracy and weoutline an approach to a broad and non-segregating literacy curriculum ai-ming at every pupil’s right to develop a strong identity as a literate and capablecitizen in a democratic community.