The Nordic Social Democratic Regime in Education Colliding with the Global Neo-Liberal Regime

Abstract

Nordic countries have historically constructed the so-called social democratic welfare model with its core values and political, cultural and economic aims and ideologies. Some comparative researchers have also claimed that one of the dimensions of this model has been the Nordic or social democratic educational model, which has historically united the educational politics of the five countries (see e.g. Tjeldvoll A: Introduction. In: Tjeldvoll A (ed) Education and the scandinavian welfare state in the year 2000 – equality, policy, and reform. Garland Publishing/Taylor & Francis Group, New York/London, pp xi–xviii, 1998a; Telhaug AO, Mediås OA, Aasen P: Scand J Educ Res 48(2):141–158, 2004), JustEd – Nordic Centre of Excellence: Justice through Education in The Nordic Countries). This situation has certainly changed and the Nordic nations have made different kinds of educational political decisions especially during the latest 40 years of globalization and the mainstream of neoliberal educational politics, but still preserved some parts of their historical common core. In this chapter I describe historically the global turn towards neoliberal educational politics and compare and research, how the Nordic countries and especially Finland have reacted and interpreted the global pressures of the supranational organizations and the reform movements in different dimensions. These dimensions or themes of global neoliberal educational politics involve e.g. new governance, New Public Management, steering at a distance, steering by numbers and privatization of education.