This presentation deals with the how the vision of including children with special educational needs into their local school/classroom, constituted for instance in UNESCO's The Salamanca Statement and Framework on Special Needs Education, has merged with other contemporary discourses (ideas and practices) in Icelandic education. In particular, it is focused on the historical conjuncture of inclusion politics, individualism, a technological approach to education, medical discourses of diagnosing children, and market ideology and practices. These approaches are analyzed as discursive patterns of legitimating principles functioning in Icelandic education at the beginning of the 21st century. The analysis is primarily of several government policy documents from 1990s and the first years of the 21st century. The ministry of education, science and culture was asked to provide the most important documents in the area of inclusion and special education policy. Additionally other important documents were analyzed, in particular a document sent to every home in the country explaining the 1999 curriculum revision.It is argued that the focus on democracy and diversity in the Salamanca documents released by UNESCO has got lost in an atmosphere where the provision of resources for children with diagnosable needs have become a problem of management rather than of pedagogy, paving the way for medical methods focusing on problems of individuals. The Icelandic government's emphasis on producing strong, independent school students who are able to learn more in a shorter time, the subject matter focus in the 1999 curriculum for early childhood, primary and secondary schools, and the publication of league tables in 4th, 7th and especially 10th grade in the primary school have also damaged the democratic vision of inclusion. Furthermore, there are proposals of publishing such league tables for the exit examination of the secondary school.Particular attention will be paid to the impact of the government´s goal to provide "powerful" analysis of special educational needs for children who are entering compulsory education at the age of six. It is argued that the consequences are to place difficulties as the fault in a child, rather than to focus on pedagogical approaches and teaching methods that support inclusion of all children. In other research projects it has also been observed that this leads schools to develop elaborate systems of labels for special educational needs, normalizing teachers to think in terms of a medical rather than a pedagogical model. This means that children's medically diagnosable needs are more likely to be served than their needs if they are based on cultural and social differences.