It has long been taken for granted that no serious drama work was done in Swedish schools before the 1950s. However, at the Tyringe Helpension – a progressive education girls’ boarding school that existed between the years 1909-1936 – drama was used as a method in many school subjects, as well as for social training. Ester Boman, the founder and principal of Tyringe, even talked about theatre as an experimental laboratory of the humanities. This study explores how that drama work evolved and why it has been forgotten.

The study uses traditional history research methods with an emphasison hermeneutics, and with some addition from recent critical text analysis.

The educational drama at the Tyringe Helpension is contextualized from five aspects: 1) The life and work of Ester Boman. 2) The private Swedish girls’ school system. 3) The international and the Swedish progressive education movement – Ester Boman was strongly influenced by Sofi Almquist and Ellen Key. She was also a member of the New Education Fellowship. 4) The teaching methods of the Tyringe Helpension as a whole. 5) Previous and contemporary use of drama in education and the theory of the dramatic instinct. The study shows that these five contexts were all important for the evolution of educational drama at the Tyringe Helpension and contributedin making the drama work there exceptionally rich and varied. These contexts are also crucial for the explanation of why this work was so quickly forgotten. However, it also had some importance that the Swedish drama pioneers of the 1950s were not particularly interested in what had been done before