ABSTRACT
Nordic education is often regarded as being student-oriented and rooted in local communities. Students’ life-worlds and needs play an important role in the endeavor of schooling, and the classroom is regarded as a common place where students actively learn and live together. By referring to the example of Norway, this chapter examines how the rhetoric on students has changed in three Norwegian core curricula, from 1987 until 2020, under the increasing significance of competence- and performance-oriented curricula. The main question concerns how a tradition that is so ambitiously responsive to students’ needs in their communal context can be reconciled with a reductive understanding of schooling that focuses on individual achievement and qualification. A discourse analysis of the three core curricula reveals that some Nordic themes and priorities in education are still visible in each of the three curricula, while others, like the idea of social togetherness, are reconceptualized in terms of competencies or simply disappear. Even if it still bears the hallmarks of a Nordic understanding of education, the current rhetoric on students in Norwegian curricula implies far-reaching consequences for the theoretical conceptualization of the school as an institution and of its mandate for and in Nordic societies.
