Over the past ten to fifteen years, state schools have demanded more personal responsibility from parents. Thus, paradoxically, personal responsibility has become a public matter. Each individual school must decide how to develop parents’ personal responsibility. Responsibility games have been articulated as a response to this challenge. We investigate how schools organize responsibility games and how these games affect responsibility. We pursue two theses. The first thesis is that in the current discourse, personal responsibility is transformed into a public matter. The second thesis is that the responsibility games designed to promote personal responsibility both dislocate and deconstruct the form of personal responsibility. To help us conceptualizing personal responsibility we turn to Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida.

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