One of the election promises of the current Swedish government was to reform school policy, bringing back “order and discipline” in order to improve dwindling school results. Such calls were framed as a stern reaction against progressivist, leftist let-go educational ideas from the 1960s. The new government has instituted policies accordingly, ranging from more grades and national test to teachers’ rights to prohibit the use of cell phones.
Parallel to this, however, is another governmental move, aimed at introducing entrepreneurship into the curriculum at all school levels, including teacher education. The argument is that Sweden needs more entrepreneurship, in order to secure economic growth and welfare. In the framing of such measures we hear that schools should stimulate creativity and student initiatives and that entrepreneurship is a wider concept than starting a business. Nutek - the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth, which runs entrepreneurship programs for schools, defines entrepreneurship as “a dynamic and social process, where individuals, alone or in groups, identify opportunities and ideas and transform them to practical and goal oriented activities in social, cultural or economic contexts”.
Such reframing of entrepreneurship might be interpreted as a way of inducing initially resistant teachers into accepting it. An interview/focus group study on how entrepreneurship is taken up by teachers and school administrators (Berglund & Holmgren, 2007) found that it was indeed translated from a narrow understanding of business creation into a wide concept best described as an attitude, or a way of relating to the world. More specifically, teachers say that when they do entrepreneurship education they “create conditions for at way of relating to the world which is characterized by creativity, reflexivity and power of initiative”. Moreover, they have learnt to “consider practical knowledge on equal footing with theoretical knowledge”, and they “develop the school, mainly by developing new ways of organizing education”. The report was enthusiastically received by teachers, administrators and people working to promote entrepreneurship education. “Finally, people will learn about, and appreciate, what we do” was a general sentiment. The reconceptualization of entrepreneurship as a concept for an integrated pedagogy was considered a big leap ahead. The ugly duckling had been transformed into a beautiful swan. The reception at the political level was, however, less enthusiastic, not to say downright critical. The authors were basically told off by the national politicians at a presentation seminar in Stockholm in November 2007. Entrepreneurship education should be concerned with business creation, its success measured by number of student companies started, and this report, feared the chairperson of the Government’s education committee, only demonstrated that progressivist ideas were back again. The swan had become an ugly duckling instead. In a way, her observation was correct. In this paper we argue that entrepreneurship education, as interpreted by Swedish teachers and by actors working to promote it, indeed has much in common with progressivist pedagogy (Dewey, 1910, 1916, 1938; Freire, 1970, 1973, 1998). The paper shows how a policy initiative and a concept is transformed and translated at the local level into something that teachers find that they can use (Berger & Luckmann, 1966), creating an opportunity for teachers but a problem for politicians – the cat is out of the bag, politicians can hardly pull entrepreneurship back again. It also demonstrates the inherent tension between the governments’ call for entrepreneurship and their call for order and discipline. Entrepreneurship has become an umbrella for progressivist education, which politicians do not promote. Finally, it has created some real problems for the government in that teachers hear mixed messages from them, which at the local level serve to hold back change processes.
References
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