This symposium focuses on historical and contemporary cases of diversity and boundary-making in regard to schooling and norms and standards, which can be understood through the centralizing frame of “making up” people (see Hacking, 2002, pp. 99–114) and the educationalization of social problems since the late 18^th and early 19^th centuries (e.g., Depaepe & Smeyers, 2008). In Europe during the Enlightenment and following the French Revolution, new understandings and concepts of the state developed to place a heavy emphasis on democratization and a belief that the state and its people actively legitimize and sustain each other. In its new democratic role, the modern state had to decide how its populations would be politically and socially defined, organized, and categorized as “the people.” The states’ new creations of the people, and their coinciding new categories and labels, also created “new ways for people to be” and new social realities became possible (Hacking, 2002, pp. 100, 103).

With this necessity for “making people,” modern states thus turned to education and institutionalized the making of people through the creation or revision of schooling laws and processes of mass, compulsory schooling (e.g., Westberg et al., 2019). These modern educational institutions were organized in ways that favored certain categorization practices of people, according to the state’s ideal social standards and norms at the time. These practices helped to create both those who fit the standards and norms and “others” who did not quite fit in. What we will focus on in our symposium are cases of how these “others” were created, categorized, labeled, and learned from an early age: notably beginning with children’s entrance into (or even exclusion from) modern state schooling.

We will show examples of how modern European states have been educationalizing the “making of people” and creating and preferring certain standards and norms over others through processes of categorizing and labeling their diverse populations. The “making up of people” via education involved the whole school experiences and lifeworlds of the students (e.g., Pinar, 2004). Therefore, we will be considering the modern state schooling within our cases as encompassing the teachers, students, parents, and their practices as well as the state apparatuses. In particular, we will discuss these modern practices as they were handled in three specific examples from Switzerland, Denmark, and Austria. We start with the case of how Swiss teachers categorized and labeled young children as intellectually “normal” or “abnormal” since the late 19^th century and what this meant for the different types of schooling and education made available to these children. We will then use our second case from Austria to show how a number of “abnormal” categories were merged together to encompass “atypical” children under the umbrella term of “neurodiverse” in the international world by the late 1990s, but how it has been up to individual Austrian teachers rather than official Austrian legislation to bring the inclusive “neurodiverse” label into the schools in an effort to make the “abnormal” children “normal” again. Finally, we will look at a case from today by showing how children (and their parents) in Denmark are standardized through specific notions of “time” regulations in their transition from kindergarten to primary school.

Depaepe, M., & Smeyers, P. (2008). Educationalization as an ongoing modernization process (Symposium Introduction). Educational Theory, 58(4), 379–389. Hacking, I. (2002). Historical ontology. Harvard University Press. Pinar, W. F. (2004). What is curriculum theory? Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. Westberg, J., Boser, L., & Brühwiler, I. (Eds.). (2019). School acts and the rise of mass schooling. Education policy in the long nineteenth century. Palgrave Macmillan.