Fabricating and Governing the Swedish School Pupil: The Swedish Post-War School Reform and Changing Discourses of Discipline and Behaviour (original) (raw)
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Fabricating and Governing the Swedish School Pupil
Nordic Journal of Educational History
This article examines the dominant discourses of behaviour and discipline in the debate on schooling and the conduct of school pupils in Swedish professional teacher journals between 1946 and 1962, the formative years of the Swedish comprehensive school. Drawing from the theoretical framework of discourse, governmentality and the fabrication of the subject developed by Michel Foucault, the fabrication and governing of the school pupil is highlighted and analysed. The findings of the study are related to historical research of the period as well as Foucauldian studies where a historical shift of perspectives on discipline and behaviour in the school have been proposed. The result is a detailed analysis of the fabrication and governing of the subject within the dominant discourses of behaviour and discipline during the period, as well as a critical nuancing of the idea of this historical shift.
Paedagogica Historica - International Journal of the History of Education , 2013
This article examines the vision of the Swedish comprehensive school reform between 1946-1962 as it pertains to the ever-troubling questions of discipline and order in school. Inspired primarily by the work of Michel Foucault and his genealogical perspective, the article problematizes the notion that character formation and school discipline during this period underwent a radical democratic transformation, and that this was the successful result of a progressive political agenda. This account of school discipline is shown to be problematic since it conceals a complex and even ironic historical process, where a disciplinarian discourse in school lingered and even widened and deepened disciplinary practice during the period.
History of Education Review
PurposeThe overall aim of this article is to discuss the conditions and character of collective protest in schools. When do pupils as a collective gain the ability to express critical views on the policies of schools, and what is that criticism about? Using Sweden as an example, I discuss this question by studying the collective organisation of pupils from the 1920s to the 1980s.Design/methodology/approachThe article discusses and compares two phases of pupils' collective organisation in Sweden: one dominated by pupil councils, one by national organisations. The article discusses how pupil councils at individual schools arose in the wake of the 1928 grammar school charter, and illustrates its influence using a case study of a grammar school in Stockholm. Furthermore, the article investigates how national organisations, first formed in 1952, expressed their concerns about national school policies.FindingsThe first phase (ca. 1928–1951) was dominated by the idea of discipline, and...
The Concept of Authority and the Swedish Educational Crisis
Philosophy of Education 2016, 2017
In 1958, Hannah Arendt published “The Crisis in Education” addressing what she considered to be the poor state of contemporary American education. While the causes of this educational crisis were identified as being part of much broader processes of social and political change, education stood out as the social arena where the effects of these transformations were most obvious. The lack of authority in modern societies, in particular, was one of the most manifest symptoms of the crisis in education. Arendt claimed that this lack of authority eroded the fundamental relation between teacher and student and the mutual trust necessary for safeguarding the social position of the teacher. In this paper, we aim to use Arendt’s concept of authority in order to diagnose a current crisis in Swedish education, and to argue that this may help us understand the role of the teacher from a perspective that is missing in the current debate on Swedish education.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FOUCAULT'S NOTION OF DISCIPLINE: THE INSIGHT INTO TEACHERS' PRACTICE
Building on Foucault's understanding of disciplinary power I would like to investigate the power relations shaping contemporary teachers' reality. In Discipline and Punish the philosopher describes various procedures in which people, described as 'docile bodies' are controlled, influenced, analyzed until they perform expected behavior, 'the norm'. My focal point is to show those hidden techniques of 'training' teachers' such as observations, normalizing judgements or examinations which are often not recognizable as such by the teachers themselves. While nowadays, the power relations are more complex than only the disciplinary type, it is worthwhile considering the discipline power still constitutes teachers. It needs to be underlined that the disciplinary power is more dangerous from other power relations because it remains invisible, and accordingly so effective. The paper demonstrates that the 'disciplinary' world of education that has not changed much rather developed its techniques since the eighteenth century. At the same time, it raises some important questions in need of further investigation regarding power relations that shape teachers' proffesion.
The school as crime scene: Discourses on degrading treatment in Swedish schools
Power and Education, 2015
There is a strong case for stating that during the past decades there has been a shift in perspective when addressing questions of how to handle and preserve social order in Swedish schools. As an institution that has focused on social order and education since the 1990s, the Swedish school system has also become an institution that focuses on social order in terms of law and legal issues. The overall purpose of the article is to explore in which contexts and in what ways degrading treatment is articulated in policy documents that relate to social order in Swedish schools. Methodologically, the authors use a discourse analytical approach. They study how contexts and articulations identified in policy documents relate to discourses of degrading treatment, and thus contribute to an understanding of how degrading treatment as a concept is constituted. Articulated in different contexts and in different ways, the results show that degrading treatment is constituted as a somewhat ambiguou...
Representing and intervening in Swedish education—Mediating and adjudicating by grading numbers
Financial Accountability & Management
Educational reforms are attempts to transform and reconstitute conceptions of knowledge, the practice of teaching and the forms of subjectivity associated with being a teacher, pupil, and parent. We will investigate a particular aspect of the extensive changes that have swept across the landscape of Swedish education over the last decades. We will show how the grading system has come to fulfill a mediating role between progressivist educational ideas and neoliberal notions of individual choice and entrepreneurship, by way of adjudicating and mediating educational performance for individual pupils, schools, and the education system at large. The aggregated output of the grading system is used for instrumental purposes such as performance management, quality management, and bench marking in the school system. Grading and its associated practices extend throughout the entire school system, defining success and failure from individual classrooms to the national level as the dominant form of representing school performance. The grading system was initially intended to reshape the inner workings of education in Sweden but subsequently became the "gold standard" deployed in various managerial practices. Our analysis demonstrate the performative powers when seemingly innocent techniques are put to use in public sector reforms and new worlds are made and unmade by complex constellations of seemingly mundane techniques and ideational frameworks.