Recent examinations of education policies in Europe demonstrate a common transnational interest in educational standards and goals (Young, 2010). This interest motivates state- and school authorities to orient reform activities towards competence and test scores. As a further consequence, curricula and learning materials are developed to specify what counts as poor, good, and excellent perfomance.

Numerous studies have already revealed the problematic aspects of specifying standards into competencies, such as that they merely represent a dispositional concept of student learning (Otto & Schrödter, 2010), and that they lack a normative foundation for educational purposes and practices among teachers and students in schools (Biesta, 2009). Still, against this background, competencies are used to improve learing, school quality and teaching practices (Heid, 2007). As argued by Young (2010), competencies transfer the liability for the progress of learning from the teacher to the student. This problem may continue in the contexts of teaching technologies in so far as they offer specifications of what the learner is going to achieve and accomplish without additional support (e.g., by guidelines). New technologies bring up questions about the ways in which teachers act as professionals, taking educational purposes and students’ needs and future lives into account. Are teachers by their use of new technology able to guide students in accordance with their mandates and towards overall goals? The question leads to another question: Do competence goals cover, and if so, how far do they cover, significant challenges for all students’ future lives, engaging students to become educated in terms of Bildung?

From a theoretical perspective, policy programs together with new technologies aim to formally govern and control what to learn in schools. Although, an idea of defining educational standards and goals can imply specification of what students are expected to learn, it can also, indirectly, implicate predefined contents and methods. Volker Bank (2005) sees competencies as a kind of standard in which the components of content matter and desired behaviour (enacted goals) are identified. In the case of Bildung, however, these components are open-ended and determined by what should be accomplished as a result of teaching processes. Therefore, with reference to the concept of Bildung, teachers cannot prepare students for certain defined life-situations of our life-world, but instead can only extend the individual’s space of possibilities to reach their goals (Bank, 2005). In this case, the didactic distinction between content matter and meaning is kept “alive and allowed” (Hopmann, 2007, p. 118).

The idea of Bildung is also reflected in Dewey’s ideas about the significance of “guided pathways” within the contexts of schools. For Dewey, learning takes place within a context which serves as a guiding path for futures experience. Moreover, education presumes learning; however, it is not observed as merely what students know or are able to do. Instead, learning and teaching are regarded as processes for students to find their way into their future (Dewey, 1915/1990), where teaching content and methods are selected in regard to students’ diverse backgrounds, needs, and possible futures.

This symposium brings researchers from three European countries together for analysis and discussion of the roles of standards and goals in a variety of teaching contexts. They take as their origins research contexts in three different countries: Norway, Sweden, and Austria. Drawing on document analysis and interviews with teachers and/or students, they analyse and discuss empirical findings and interpretations about the ways in which purposes, standards and goals allow for taking students’ own preferences and futures into account.

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