The purpose of this dissertation is to study the vocational and career education in upper secondary school and to answer the question if and how this education contributes to the socialization of the younger generation to the various sectors and positions of working life. The ambition was also to acquire more general knowledge of the mechanisms generating different classroom discourses. The main problem thus deals with how and why an objective reality, in this case the working world, is transformed into various teaching situations and how and why it grows into different classroom discourses. In accordance with the theoretical frame of reference, career education is regarded as a transmission of ideologies and as part of the social reproduction process. By analogy with this approach the training effects have been studied in terms of transmitted opinions and notions in various aspects of education and working life. For a period of one year we observed the instruction in social studies and vocational teaching in four different course programmes of upper secondary school. The empirical studies also include interviews with teachers and students in nursing and metalwork course programmes, in economics, in social sciences and in natural sciences as well as employees in the metalwork and health-care sector. The main aim was to study the notions of education and working life of various interested parties in relation to the notions transmitted in the course programmes. The results show that there are great differences in vocational teaching in the different course programmes, in spite of the fact that the content of this teaching is supposed to be almost identical according to the curriculum. In an attempt to explain the formation of education we have formulated a "content-related steering group theory". In simplified terms this means that the content of education is characterized by certain predominant structures of thought characteristic of both the social field (sector) and the social stratum (level) towards which the education is primarily directed. The predominant structures of thought are brought into the classrooms through the students' individual and historical relations with the world of work. These structures then function as a generating and controlling mechanism for the classroom discourse. The teacher will, more or less unconsciously, adjust the content of his or her teaching to the predominant structures of thought of the selection of students forming his or her class. Our analysis ends in the assumption that the differences in structures of thought between students in various course programmes are reinforced during the time spent in upper secondary school - not so much as a result of the education itself, but more as a result of the different social environments of different student categories to which the education is adapted. / digitalisering@umu