A central question for this article is how social sciences teachers in middle school (age 10-12) relate to and talk about school’s fundamental democratic values as crucial parts of the teachers' assignments. The article aims to provide insight into how the teachers thereby position and constitute themselves as social science teachers and how this is intimately connected to their didactical practise. Three social science teachers were interviewed and in the analysis various subject positions were identified. The results show that teachers are trying to balance between the subject content they are required to work with, and a democratic assignment which is often interpreted in terms of students’ influence and participation. The difficulties to fully carry out student participation in every day teaching evokes interpretations of the democratic assignment as a question of what general approaches a teacher should have towards students, and a general mission to empower and equip students for the future. These approaches are strongly influencing how the informants construct themselves as teachers. However, it is also shown that the subject content of social sciences to some extent may enforce the possibilities of achieving the aims of a democratic assignment, which strengthens the argument that both the process of becoming a teacher and the challenges of the democratic assignment need to be situated and further developed within the contexts of specific school subjects.

In this paper, focus rests on the relatively new international phenomenon of therapeutic education. Taking in the fact that this phenomenon is part of the schools’ assigned task to see to the formation of young people, the aim of the paper is twofold: to highlight what rationales that emerge in the formation of young people’s emotions in school, and to discuss these rationales in terms of vital principles of public education for the common good in society. The results are based on an empirical case study of ten Swedish teachers involved in the so-called Life Competence Education, which serves as a contextualisation of this phenomenon. Two rationales of this formation stand out as key; the seriousness of the inward turn of the individual, and the crucial step of sharing one’s innermost. Although these rationales involve collective notions of the students’ emotional well-being, they are quite firmly anchored, we argue, in the single individuals’ well-being.