Following a line of seemingly unsatisfying results on the OECD-structured PISA tests, political reforms was completed in the municipal primary and lower secondary schools in Denmark in 2014. The reform meant an increased number of in-school hours in the form of more lessons, mandatory homework club and supported education for all pupils enrolled in the Danish national public school system (Gravesen & Ringskou 2016a: 48-50). This means that out of all 35 OECD-countries Denmark now demand the second largest number of in-school hours in the world, with Australia coming in first. The Danish pupils will now be expected to put in roughly 11.000 hours in total throughout their primary and lower secondary school life - roughly 4000 hours more than the OECD-average of 7000 hours (OECD 2016: 380). For the pupils, more time spend in school obviously means less self-governed free time and space for leisure-time activities. So, what effects will this reform, resulting in more pedagogically structured and controlled activities, have on the young peoples’ structuring of their everyday routines and activities?
Educational progress has become a core imperative of the Danish state. A so-called 95-percent-objective relates to the official idea that “Denmark must be prepared to seize the opportunities of the global economy”, consequently ensuring that 95% of each youth cohort achieve at least upper secondary education (Frostholm & Gravesen 2016). We are interested in exploring how this governmental target, will affect the everyday life of our young target group.
Through fieldwork and interviews we ask around 100 8th-graders, from four public schools in a medium-sized provincial town in Denmark, how they seem to manage their free times and spaces between structural, political and institutional demands on the one side and their own personal needs, motivations and desires on the other – How do they manage to make ends meet? In this presentation, we seek to answer and further problematize such key questions through a comparative preliminary analysis on parts of the empirical set of data, of our still ongoing research project.
Like most young people in 8th grade, the young informants involved in this research project seem to navigate between both structured and seemingly more unstructured schedules in their free time in the after-school hours. Following the overall lines of the present ECER Call for Papers, and the emphasis on the prevalent Knowledge Economy discourse found here, our research points towards the fact that the completion of the 2014 school reform causes, as a rather natural consequence, one might add, the young people to have less individual free time on an everyday basis. The increased amount of pedagogically structured activities, being the practical result of the completion of the school reform, leave the young people faced with an ever-present demand to learn, to perfect and qualify themselves. Following the sociological insights of Jean-Pierre Tabin, the state is becoming ever more omnipresent in the everyday life of the citizen, trying to invoke a right to control the individual by giving out orders (Frostholm 2016) – in the light of our empirical findings, this means orders on how to spend time. Following the theoretical framework of Nikolas Rose, we state that the school reform seen as a pedagogical technology is completed to help forming responsible citizens and to: “bind the inhabitants of a territory into a single polity, a space of regulated freedom” (Rose 1992: 158) (Frostholm & Gravesen 2016). Such sociological insights and perspectives will be elaborated on in our future publications following our research project and in our ECER 2017 presentation.
