Power, State and Education: Restructuring the Nordic Model

Equality, inclusion and marketization of Nordic education: Introductory notes

“…Blossing et al, 2014), extensive Nordic-comparative studies of the tension-filled field between older and newer education policies are, however, still lacking. While a host of recent education policy research, mostly consisting of single-country studies, describes and analyzes the consequences of the stronger emphasis on academic performance, school choice and New Public Management (NPM) in the Nordic countries, less interest has been shown in the relationship between the older social democratic education policies and the newer, neoliberally oriented ones (although for examples of such analyses, see Antikainen, 2006Antikainen, , 2010Arnesen and Lundahl, 2006;Blossing et al, 2014;Telhaug et al, 2004;Wiborg, 2004Wiborg, , 2013. My brief introductory notes seek to explore this area somewhat further.…”

From learning to labour to learning for marginality: school segregation and marginalization in Swedish suburbs

“…It suggests that the schools there only work well for a limited subgroup of the population (Bunar 2008;Dahlstedt 2009;Goldring and Hausman 1999;Gewirtz 1994, 1996;Echolls and Willms 1995) and it thus questions the integration aims of the educational system, to give marginalized groups an opportunity to win the kind of citizenship status and identity that life would/might otherwise be expected to deny them (Marshall 1950). This was formerly one of the aims of schooling in Sweden (Englund 2004) and Scandinavia generally (Antikainen 2010). But there is a problem in the new millennium where schools have become incubators of competitive individualism and individual mobility (Beach and Dovemark 2009).…”

“…Since the middle of the 1990s welfare State policies in Scandinavian countries have followed a quite well-known international pattern by taking a significant turn toward neo-liberalism (Antikainen 2010). This tendency is also clearly recognizable in the educational systems in these countries, such as in Sweden, where educational consumerism and individualism have replaced comprehensiveness and inclusion as capstones of recent developments (Englund 2004;Beach and Dovemark 2009).…”

Welfare State Restructuring in Education and its National Refractions

“…Moreover, both countries represent the Nordic welfare state model, yet with distinctive national trajectories and timings in welfare and education policy. Finland's success in the PISA studies makes it an interesting case in itself (see Antikainen, 2007). Ireland was for long a rather poor peripheral country in Europe, locked into religious traditionalism.…”