For the first time in Swedish educational history 2010 an assessment reform led to marks and national testing earlier in children’s life than the previous one. The Swedish government claim that pupils needs to be pushed to study harder “prep shall pay off!”. In a rhetorical sense this is clearly borrowing from the past, but can this development also be understood in other ways? That politicians manage to legitimize a new reform by referring to the past is not that difficult to understand, but actually manage to reintroduce past solutions is more difficult to understand. One way to see how this development has been possible is to look at how relevant alternatives disappeared. The presentation will focus on how teachers and their representatives gave up their own assessment procedures between 1940 and 2000 for other new professional “core constructs”. Instead of modernizing core content in teacher training the content where exchanged with something new. It will be shown how pr ogressive forces while creating a strong pervasive (socio-psychological) alternative to past school system, “forgot” that some traditions filled important learning purposes. Instead of an international progressive assessment policy, Sweden search in the past for lost assessment skills.