ABSTRACT
In the decades after the Second World War, Nordic continental-style elitist gymnasiums increasingly came under scrutiny as unprecedented numbers of students sought secondary education, while policymakers endeavoured to integrate these schools into a coherent system of democratic mass education. This chapter compares Danish and Norwegian upper-secondary-school reforms, with special emphasis on their implications for teachers’ professional status and autonomy. It argues that while Danish gymnasium teachers were active in designing reforms and defended the gymnasium’s elitist tradition and their own status with considerable success, their Norwegian colleagues saw their professional identity and educational values marginalised in a national educational reform push driven by the implementation of nine-year scheme of comprehensive schooling. The post-war overhaul of the Norwegian educational system started at the elementary and lower-secondary levels, and gymnasium teachers were increasingly side-lined in educational and curricular reform processes. Three complementary explanations of these diverging national trajectories are suggested: the different sequence of reforms in each national education system, the unequivocal dominance of upper-middle-class culture in Danish society, and a stronger social-democratic political hegemony in Norway. Adding to this, Danish schools had a long tradition of liberal self-organisation, in some contrast to the more homogeneous school system in Norway.
