In contrast to countries where citizenship is taught as a specific subject, Sweden has a curriculum stipulated in the Education Act stating that all school activities must respect fundamental values and that these values should be upheld in all subjects. The values transmitted in reading primers, therefore, constitute an important medium for conveying fundamental values. Twenty-four student teachers working in pairs were given the task of analysing some common reading primers as the object for analysis with the aim of discovering in what way the texts disclosed or embedded values, and how they reflected society's ideals of an individual's moral education. Simultaneously, the students' ability to perform critical analyses was explored through reference to what was interpreted as the 'ideal citizen' in such books. The student teachers' findings indicated prototypes of 'good behaviour', the predominance of monocultural settings, blurred descriptions revealing an underlying middle-class perspective and conservative gender roles. However, many analyses were based on quantification, absences were not analysed at all and reading methodology frequently overshadowed content. The authors' central conclusion is that text analysis and meaning-making needs further emphasis in Swedish teacher education.