ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the concepts of national curriculum and governance and the possibility of applying transnational perspectives, for instance when doing comparisons between countries in the search for patterns that transcend the national. As to research on school governance on a local level, the material consists mainly of municipal school policy documents. According to Swedish university textbooks on the history of education, but also curriculum theory, the development of governance of the Swedish school system in the twentieth century went through several phases. During the 1940s, the Swedish education system was subject to two major investigations: the 1940s school report and the 1946 school commission. A basic methodological approach has been to consider not only the ideals about what mathematics education was supposed to be but how it was supposed to be governed. The New Math project in Sweden stands out as a clear break with the interdependence between producers and consumers of textbooks.