ABSTRACT
In this chapter, an attempt is made to determine the essential meaning of the Nordic education model by investigating the author’s lived experience of growing up in the heyday of the model. The model is seen as a reflective and liberating attitude to prevailing knowledge and, above all, to the technological knowledge of modern industrial society and the historical identity-forming knowledge of the Nordic nations in the 20th century. Such knowledge was not only a knowledge for everyone, a classless knowledge spread by the school system, but it was also a knowledge that could be questioned critically. The essence of the model is seen as an attitude of not just taking a body of knowledge for granted, but, rather, of wanting to understand how tenable it is and what it can mean in practical terms. Such an attitude has come under pressure in a time in which we see a tendency to prefer knowledge undisturbed by too much critical understanding.
