National Cultural Protestant ways around Bildung in an emerging Nordic welfare-nation-state, early and mid-20th century

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Abstract

National Cultural Protestant ways around Bildung in an emerging Nordic welfare-nation-state, early and mid-20th century The discussions about the influence of OECD standards specifically and globalisation of education in general have in the past decades challenged the ideological narratives around the so-called Nordic Model of Education, defined by the goal of creating social mobility through education, and by the aim of schooling citizens into a mentality of equity and equal participation suitable for the welfare state (Antikainen 2006; Telhaug et al. 2006; Buchardt, Markkola & Valtonen 2013). In context of the Danish welfare state, among the opponents of what is allegedly seen as the immigrating flow of Anglo-Saxon functionalist and goal-driven competence orientation, a relaunch of Bildung as symbol of a Nordic cultural democratic tradition and educational progressivism has gathered a mixed crowd of leftists, ultra-right national conservatives and neo-Grundtvigians, i.e. nationally oriented cultural Christians in the Folk High School tradition. Historically, however, the idea of competence was actually brought into a Danish educational context by progressivist leftist reformers and pedagogues during the 1970s in connection with the contextualisation of Klafki’s critical-constructive understanding of political Bildung, launched as acting-competence (“Handlekompetence”), and thus recontextualised from US-American as well as German education theory (e.g. Schnack 2001. See Buchardt 2017). This was a continuation of the first serious attack on the Bildung orientation since the late 19th century that emerged in the Danish Cold War educational reforms in the late 1950s and early 1960s, particularly conspicuous in the curricular reform work around the 1958 School Act which was a central step in the direction of an undivided comprehensive welfare state model school. A central political ambition was to direct school towards usefulness in ‘Real life’, like e.g. Tröhler (e.g. 2016) has shown happened in other national Cold War education reforms. In the Danish reform work debate, “Real life” referred to relevance for the labour market as well as to vitalist “life relatedness” (“livsnærhed”) and formed the modernising alternative to classical Bildung. School should teach labour skills and in a life-related way raise the pupils to become happy; two goals that were seen as closely connected and partly identical (Buchardt & Plum 2019). A central source of inspiration for this change of focus was national Cultural Protestantism, fuelled by the national awakening following WWII. It draws on an overlapping complex of socially practised ideas of National Christian Grundtvigianism and popularised liberal theologian ideas of Christianity as ethics and culture for the nation, with science as a central means to utilise Christianity as part of the nation-building. With a theoretical inspiration from Bernstein’s (e.g. 2000) concepts of recontextualization and pedagogizing and based on a source material consisting of ministerial commission work, educational handbooks and public pedagogical debate in newspapers and pedagogical journals, the paper explores how national Cultural Protestant public intellectuals from the early to the mid-20th century developed ideas in favour of and against the concept of Bildung while investing in labour education and science as a way of engineering the nation welfare state (Kettunen 2011) through education. Antikainen, A (2006). In search of a Nordic model of education. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50, 229-243. Bernstein, B (1990). Social Construction of Pedagogic Discourse. In Bernstein, B. Class, Codes and Control. The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse (pp. 165–218). London/NY: Routledge. Buchardt, M (2012). Undervisningsformer – historisk og aktuelt (Forms of teaching – historically and currently). In PØ Andersen, & T Ellegaard (Eds.) Klassisk og moderne pædagogisk teori (Classic and modern pedagogical theory) (pp. 315–336). Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag. Buchardt, M, Markkola, P, & Valtonen, H (2013). Education and the Making of the Nordic Welfare States. In M Buchardt, P Markkola, & H Valtonen (Eds.) Education, State and Citizenship (pp. 7–30). Helsinki: NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research, IV. Buchardt, M & Plum, M (2019 - forthcomming). Nordic Education as schooling for ‘life’ between two ‘Sputnik shocks’. ‘Other States’ as Argument in Danish Educational Reforms from the 1950s Onwards. In: H Tavares & J Qi (eds.): Educational Temporalities: Local, National, and Global Perspectives. Rotterdam/Taipei/Boston: Sense Publishers. Kettunen, P (2011). Welfare Nationalism and Competitive Community. NordWel Studies in Historical Welfare State Research (pp.79–117). Telhaug, AO, Mediås, OA, & Aasen, P (2006). The Nordic Model in Education: Education as Part of the Political System in the Last 50 Years. Scandinavian Journal of Educational Research, 50(3), 245-283. Tröhler, D. (2016) Die Pädagogisierung des Kalten Krieges. Militärische Interessen an Schulreformen nach Sputnik. In L. Boser et al (Ed.) Pulverdampf und Kreidestaub. Beiträge zum Verhältnis zwischen Militär und Schule in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (pp.391–411). Bern: Bibliothek am Guisanplatz.
OriginalsprogEngelsk
Publikationsdato1 maj 2019
StatusUdgivet - 1 maj 2019
BegivenhedInternational Standing Conference on the History of Education - Porto, Portugal
Varighed: 16 jul. 201920 jul. 2019
Konferencens nummer: 41

Konference

KonferenceInternational Standing Conference on the History of Education
Nummer41
Land/OmrådePortugal
ByPorto
Periode16/07/201920/07/2019

Emneord

  • Bildung
  • Church History
  • Education Policy History
  • Nordic States
  • Transnational History

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