The Norwegian School for All: Historical Emergence and Neoliberal Confrontation

Abstract

The public educational system in Norway can be characterised by the equal right for every child to have an education of equal quality in a common school for all pupils regardless of social background, abilities, gender or ethnic background. This system has played a long and important role in Norway’s development from a relatively poor country at the beginning of the twentieth century to one of the world’s richest and most developed welfare state systems today. However, growing international influence on education policy, neoliberalism and growth of individualistic attitudes in public thought around the millennium have altered the conditions for this enduring education system, causing widespread concern that the fundamental values underpinning this system have been undermined. This chapter discusses how new management systems in education may challenge the traditional ideal of ‘a school for all’ and what empirical research says about the matter.

The chapter presents a brief history of how the Norwegian school system has developed since the eighteenth century and how the new transnational policies were introduced in Norway after the millennium. Recent evidence shows that there is greater bureaucracy and paperwork in schools, more concern about test-based results and performance-based educational quality indicators than broader educational aims, increasing differences between districts and schools and between social groups and gender. The traditional balance between community and individualism is being upset by the dominance of the latter.