Dewey closes one of his texts with the words “what we want and need is education pure and simple” (Dewey 1938). But even if we might agree, what does this mean for education today in a context of transnational policy reforms and national/ local diversity? Drawing on Dewey’s essay “Creative Democracy – The Task Before Us” (1939), this paper addresses the meaning of democracy and education in a globalized world, characterized by national pluralism and interdependence on the one hand and increasing nationalism on the other hand. The purpose of the study is to theorize and problematize the political, economic and cultural citizenship that is presupposed/proposed in authoritative policy texts transnationally and nationally. For this purpose, four different country reports from the transnational Organisation for Cooperation and Development (OECD) focused on the Swedish school, as well as the Swedish State’s responses to the issues raised in the OECD reports, are analyzed.

 The theoretical framework includes Dewey’s philosophical concept of "experience", understood in terms of “transactional realism” that underpins his conceptions of both democracy and education (Dewey 1916a, 1938), Dewey's interpretation of nationality (Dewey 1916b), and, finally, the concept of "rooted cosmopolitanism" (Appiah 2007, Hansen 2011, Bernstein 2000, Wahlström 2016) as a basic concept for contextualizing human interconnectedness.