This study intends to develop knowledge about how the Swedish concept of values (“Värdegrund”)is used in the media, how the concept has shifted over time in the media from 1992 to 2020, and what this says about the school's function as part of society. Since the concept of values, with its set of values was incorporated, the difficulty over time has been in different emphases of what is considered to strengthen values. Perspectives that in value pedagogical research highlight normative as well as descriptive aspects. Aspects that describe perspectives on the school's civic education and the conditions for it. In the debate about the school's civic education, aspects emerge that refer to the school as a societal function and in some respects as an institution. Here, discourses emerge that are at the framework factor level or at the institutional level that can clarify, exploring and explaining the conditions that emerge in the study's empirical data. Aspects that express both to maintain, reproduce, an ideology and partly to create, produce, and prepare students based on society's demand.  Through the ways in which school and education are treated in the media, the image of the school's social function in a certain time and a certain society is framed. Based on this, I have chosen to use the media as a peephole to see how the school's basic values concept has been activated and used over time. Content analysis has been applied to analyse 91 articles from the newspapers Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet.  The study shows how the school's values, with its set of values, which are found in the first chapter of the national curricula, relate to society's different use and application of the same values, which creates a complexity. The study shows how the school is expected to handle the increased complexity of society. The results and analyses highlight generally normative approaches that express what the school ‘should’ do, even if there are some examples of descriptive “how” different approaches are considered to strengthen values. This is made visible in how schools considered as a corrective and normative practice, where efforts are to a greater extent about counteracting factors that violate the school's values, rather than strengthening what promotes the values.