Looking back at the emergence of the term inclusion in a Danish setting, the question is: what characterized this emergence? Did inclusion express a break with existing educational theory and practice in the school system, or did it rather represent a shift in the existing educational practice? Or was it in fact a continuity in relation to an existing educational practice in Denmark that was simply being articulated as something new? The purpose of this presentation is to approach “inclusion” as a historical concept that can explicate a number of educational issues that were defined as problematic by politicians, educationalists, and teachers in the 1990s and the 2000s. Drawing on post-structuralist analytical approaches (Åkerstrøm Andersen 1999, Howarth 2005), I partly understand inclusion as a particular historical mode of problematizing educational issues by identifying factors as problematic and consequently reshaping the school system by defining inclusion as a potential solution to the problem. Education is a practice that on the one hand is tasked with delivering ideas about how something or someone should be, yet on the other hand is also tasked with handling behaviour or individuals who differ from the prevailing ideas about how a student as a school subject should be or behave – that is, students who present an exception. Education is thus also about managing diversity. Different historical periods in society and in the development of education have produced differing suggestions on how institutions should relate to the diversity of individuals. Following Foucault, educational institutions exercise a norming and disciplining function in society by defining guidelines for education and the school system. The school system thus reacts to diversity by means of a number of normalizing actions. The presentation is structured in three sections. Section one traces the history of the system’s management of diversity through scientific testing and special education. Section two deals with the emergence of inclusion in education as a new response to the management of diversity in modernity. Section three deals with the present period in the Danish school system, when school reforms influenced by OECD and PISA are challenging the ethical and rights-based understanding of inclusion that characterized the first phase of its use in the 1990s.

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