The aim of the paper is to go into the dominant ideas about education and new technology. They have through the last decades often been related to catchwords of different kinds and great visions of what can be achieved by using digital learning tools (Haugsbakk, 2011). They have to a large extent been promoted by technology companies, and their efforts were intensified during the pandemics (Williamson, 2020). The consequences have been increasingly crucial as digital media and technology entered the heart of the global economy (Schiller, 1999) and the technology giants became the largest and most powerful companies in the world (Forbes, 2022). Primarily the paper focuses on what might be perceived as a quite new phenomenon in political strategy documents, namely “adaptive learning”. In Norwegian parliamentary reports the last 5 – 10 years there has been a strong belief that adaptive learning will be able to solve a number of pedagogical challenges in the school system (Ministry of Education, 2017; Klausen, 2020). The publishing industry has been early in developing adaptive learning materials. This also applies to Norwegian publishers, partly in close relations with large American companies. Related to this, it is quite interesting that the ideas of adaptive learning for some years have been the most important prerequisite for a number of private schools in the USA gathered under the AltSchool umbrella (altschool, 2019). The AltSchool concept was founded by a former top executive at Google, and the school has received major financial support from, among others, Mark Zuckerberg (Selwyn, 2010). The We ask if adaptive learning is to be perceived as “the new mantra" in the dominant rhetoric about tomorrow's school. We go into what this entails, which ideas and values ​​underlie it and where they come from. The paper is to a large extent based on literature studies and it is inspired by various discourse analytical approaches such as e.g. Norman Fairclough's thoughts on "the technologization of discourse" (Fairclough, 2015), but also network analysis and network ethnography (Ball & Junemann, 2012).

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