ABSTRACT
With a start well before the millennium, clusters of educational reforms have moved comprehensive schooling in the Nordic countries beyond earlier national settlements and traditions. The chapter explores how a reconfiguration of schooling in epistemic terms came to play a seminal role in forming a series of national reforms starting in the 1980s. The chapter follows how revised approaches to the knowledge axis of schooling have guided reforms of common and post-compulsory schooling and changed Nordic universalist educational traditions on a number of issues. Common features of these clusters of school reforms have included shifts of knowledge visions, agendas and settlements beyond political party blocks, and new ways of setting standards by expanding national and local curriculum work. We argue that dominant perspectives on Nordic policy reform—decentralization, neoliberalism, individualism, and marketization—must be complemented by what we in this chapter call the epistemic reconfiguration perspective.
