Familiarising history : citizenship, culturalisation, and canonisation in the Danish public school

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F

AMILIARISING

H

ISTORY

Citizenship, Culturalisation, and Canonisation in the

Danish public school

by Jonas Fredslund Hansen (11248745) 10/07/2017

Sociology: Social Problems and Social Policy University of Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr. Paul Mepschen

Second reader: Prof. Dr. Jan Willem Duyvendak Word count: 18.509

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Abstract

Familiarising History is a qualitative study of recent changes in the bureaucratic field of

the state, above all the culturalisation of citizenship, with a particular focus on educational policies and practices. The interest in this specific subject originated from the regular ‘canon-fever’ that has affected the Danish society with the introduction of 8 different canons between 2004 and 2016, among which two were made mandatory in the Danish public school. Examining policies from the standpoint of a ‘total social phenomena’, this thesis relates not only to the temporary fixation of meaning in official policy documents on the public school and the educational subject of history, but equally to how the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen as well as two history teachers in the public school seek to navigate between conformity and contestation in this field of policy. Based on this empirical material, I argue that state policies on citizenship and public education indeed have become increasingly focussed on the affective and restorative forms of culturalisation and that Danish national history and culture is being fixed. At the same time, it is clear that the process of enculturalisation is not complete and that The Greenlandic House as well as history teachers in the public schools make policy and engage critically in the field of struggle, too. Other forms of culture and citizenship are being imagined and enacted by these non-state actors and street-level bureaucrats, often focussing on the functional and constructivist rather than the affective and restorative aspects of culturalisation of citizenship. These findings pose three questions for further research; a) which causes influences which parts of a policy is being assimilated and after how long, b) how do public school teachers appropriate the ideological-symbolic and the practice elements of a policy differently, and c) which effects the recent culturalisation of citizenship in Denmark has actually had for the ‘policy recipients’, namely the pupils in the public school?

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Chapter 1:

Introduction

History, both as an educational subject and as an everyday awareness, generally presents itself as a neutral and value-free image of how things used to be up until the present. It is important to keep in mind, is the fact that history is shaped by selecting which events and persons, constructing connections or not-constructing-connections between separate events, and determining what is deemed important and what is not. Turning the Past (a structure-less and open-ended field of everything that ever happened) into History (a processed and selected representation of certain events, tendencies, and ideas) has been at the forefront of symbolic struggles over identities, culture, and the responsibility for historical wrong-doings in Denmark in recent years. A conjunction of events has sparked a lot of said struggles: Greenland, a former Danish colony, voted for greater independence in 2009 (Jensen, 2016); 2014 was the 150th_{anniversary of the war between Denmark and then Prussia (Daugbjerg,}

12-03-2017); on the 1st _{of March 2017, the Danish National Archives made all their newly}

digitised documents about the United States Virgin Islands (formerly known as the Danish West Indies) available online in commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the selling of the island to the United States (Rigsarkivet, 12-03-2017); and a more overall trend, that of an increased focus on migration and globalisation (Haas, 2008), to name just four developments. The reply to these occurrences was, however, quite different. Whereas the former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt met the Greenlandic Commission of Reconciliation, initiated in 2013, with “We do not need reconciliation, but I fully respect that it is a conversation that preoccupies the Greenlandic people”1_{, the Danish public service}

channel Danmarks Radio spent little over 23 million Euros (173 million Danish Kroner of which 100 million was a special appropriation from the Danish Parliament, making it the most expensive TV production in the history of Danish television) on a TV drama about the abovementioned Danish-Prussian war in 1864, where Denmark lost the territory of Schleswig-Holstein (Ritzau, 01-04-2017). The loss of Schleswig-Holstein is central to the Danish sense of national identity and Danish history, since it symbolises a national scar of the

1_{Authors translation of: ”Vi har ikke behov for forsoning, men jeg har fuld respekt for, at det er en diskussion,}

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Danish ‘loss of empire’, and it becomes clear how some pasts should preferably be forgotten and how some should be remembered, rediscovered, and turned into History (Thisted, 2009). The rediscovering and imagining of Danish cultural heritage and national identity is apparent in the Danish ‘canon-fever’ (Ibid, p. 166), now consisting of the Danish Literature’s Canon of 2004 (with a list of 15 genres and authors that became mandatory in the Danish lessons in public schools2_{), the History Canon of 2006 (with a list of 29 events or historical}

persons that also became mandatory in the History lessons in public schools), the Cultural Canon of 2006, the Democracy Canon of 2008, the National Dish of 2014, and the Denmark Canon of 2016 (Kulturministeriet, 2006, 11-03-2017; Uddannelsesstyrrelsen, 2004, 15-06-2017; Undervisningsminsteriet, 2006, 15-06-15-06-2017; Undervisningsminsteriet, 2008; VisitDenmark, 10-03-2017). The two latest canons stand out from the four older ones in one particular aspect: Whereas the content of the Danish Literature’s Canon, the History Canon, the Cultural Canon, and the Democracy Canon were picked by experts, that is, delegated by the then ministers respectively, the National Dish and the Denmark Canon was, by and large, picked by ‘the people’. However, as already pointed out, the state and state actors have recently engaged in different kinds of symbolic struggles of nation-building and history writing, and it seems inconclusive whether it is possible to separate the production, redistribution, and valuation of different kinds of knowledge, the use of symbolic power in other words, from the common-sense perceptions and predispositions of people. That is, does it make sense to perceive (the) people as a completely autonomous, free-floating, unity without any detachment whatsoever or do discourses and institutional changes, for instance if an (culture-bearing) educational subject like history changes, indeed have an influence on how people think and act?

The fact that two of the three first canons were introduced to and made mandatory in the Danish public school, should already give some indicators to the importance of education in cultural transmission and (re)production. According to Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, education is, by virtue of the arbitrariness of the content that is being inculcated and its mode of imposition, always symbolic violence (1990). The relation between the objective structures of the world (for instance institutions and policies) and the embodied-mental structures (for instance classification schemes about Danish national identity or

2_{The official name of the Danish public school is ’The municipal primary and lower secondary school/education’.}

In this thesis the rather long and winding official name will be replaced by the term ’public school’ or ’public education’.

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dispositions towards certain choices of education) – in other words, between culture and personality – comes in many theoretical frameworks more or less full circle and education should be seen as central to this fact (Spindler, 1963). However, as much empirical work has also shown, individuals cannot just like that be reduced to their culture and pupils are not just empty containers being filled by a deterministic educational system (Levinson, 2000a). Instead, from the policy formulations by the Ministry of Education and a diverse range of other state and non-state actors to the implementation by street-level bureaucrats and the absorption or non-absorption of the policies by pupils, the meaning is being remade and contested. With that, it is not claimed that the institutionalisation and fixation of meaning in discourses, policies, and other acts of institutionalisation is insignificant, far from it. Quite the contrary, discourses and policies are very substantial and potent parts of the social world but ultimately just that. In light of this acknowledgement and additionally an anthropological perception of what is considered valuable empirical data, this thesis report will take shape as a multi-sited ethnography, focussing on the influence of and struggle over recent policies in the Danish educational system concerning citizenship, culturalisation, and canonisation. The abovementioned reflections lead to the following research question:

Research question

How is the culturalisation of citizenship being reproduced and/or contested in the making of Danish national history and its representation?

To be able to answer this general research question, this thesis will investigate the following three sub-questions, both to be able to concretise and challenge the theoretical framework and to study some separate, yet connected, aspects of the culturalisation of citizenship in the Danish educational system:

1. Which fixations of national culture have taken place in relation to citizenship and public education in Denmark within recent years?

2. How can different, non-state actors, engage in the struggle over history-writing and cultural representation?

3. How does the reproduction of the dominant culture and resistance towards it play out in everyday encounters and practices in school settings?

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Thesis outline

In this research I seek to examine the production, reproduction, and contestation of the culturalisation of citizenship in the Danish public school by looking at a range of different policy actors and policy manifestations. The starting point for achieving this result is a short description of the specific case of Denmark in relation to citizenship, canonisation, and education, followed by an outline of the broader theoretical framework. Before moving on to the empirical findings, an account of the methodological consequences of working with policy documents, semi-structured and ethnographic interviews will be accounted for. To be more precise, Chapter 2: The Danish Case will serve as the necessary background knowledge about some recent trends regarding citizenship and Danish culture policies as well as a short description of the Danish educational system. In Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework, the basic theoretical presumptions about the social world and core concepts such as the state, culturalisation of citizenship, the nation, education, and more will be outlined. Following,

Chapter 4: Methodology explains the specific ‘craftsmanlike’ framework, what kind of data is generated, and how the chosen methods contribute to answer the research question. The analysis of the collected empirical data and a presentation of the results will be presented in

Chapter 5: Analysis. The final chapter, Chapter 6: Conclusion, is dedicated to summing up the

results, discussing the theoretical implications of said results, and suggestions for future research.

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Chapter 2:

The Danish Case

Before outlining the theoretical and methodological framework that will guide this study of citizenship and public education in Denmark, some additional thoughts on citizenship, canonisation, and the Danish educational system will be laid out to ensure a basic understanding of some central concepts and the particular Danish terminology on the matter of citizenship and education.

The Danish ‘canon-fever’

In June 2016 Bertel Haarder, the former Danish Minister for Culture and Ecclesiastical Affairs, initiated The Denmark Canon (Danmarkskanonen), a canon different from the Literature Canon, the Culture Canon, and the Democracy Canon in the way that whereas the older canons focused on the material culture products, the Denmark Canon should focus on the immaterial cultural heritage and should additionally be picked by ‘the people’ instead of by experts (Kulturministeriet, 11-03-2017). The former minister asked the Danish people the following question: “Which social values, traditions or movements that have shaped us in Denmark will you carry through to tomorrow’s society?” (Kulturministeriet, 10-03-2017), and the answer came back as 2,425 suggestions from private individuals, students, politicians, culture figures, associations, and organisations. These suggestions were themed by six curators into twenty values and put to the vote, resulting in a Denmark Canon consisting of ten values (Ibid): Welfare society, Freedom, Trust, Equality for the law, Gender equality, The Danish language, Associations and voluntary work, Liberality/tolerance, Hygge3_{, and The Christian heritage}_.

According to Bertel Haarder, the Denmark Canon should be used for whatever purpose people find appropriate, but he proposes himself that it could be used for inspiring the material for the Danish citizenship-test, the Danish contribution to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage, or as educational material (Ibid). The Danish citizenship-test underwent a reform in 2015 to include questions about Danish culture and history, and furthermore underwent an important change of name from statsborgerskabsprøve to indfødsretsprøve (Udlændinge- og Integrationsministeriet, 10-03-2017). The word indfødsret originates from

3_{“Hygge is seen as a special way of being together in a relaxing, nice atmosphere. Hygge has its own word}

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the ‘Decree of indfødsret for civil servants’, signed by the Danish king Christian the 7th_on

January 15 in 1776 and is seen as the first Danish Aliens Act (Aarhus University, 13-02-2017, 10-03-2017). Whereas statsborgerskab has the more neutral ring of citizenship, indfødsret are made up from the words indfød or indfødt, meaning native or indigenous, and ret, meaning right, and indfødsret can thus be translated to the rights of the native. This change in terminology and in the content of the citizenship-test, manifests what Evelien Tonkens and Jan Willem Duyvendak term ‘the culturalization of citizenship’ and what Willem Schinkel terms ‘the virtualization of citizenship’ (Duyvendak, Geschiere, & Tonkens, 2016; Schinkel, 2010). The Denmark Canon is the latest canon in a succession of Danish canon-work, among which the Literature Canon and History Canon made mandatory in the Danish public school are of most importance here. To understand the scope of the introduction of these two canons, a short description of the Danish educational system is needed.

The Danish educational system

The compulsory schooling in Denmark is according to The Law on Public School 10 years, which includes a 1-year preschool class (0th_{grade or Kindergarten grade) and 1}st _{– 9}th

grade. As seen in Figure 1, the public school is furthermore divided into three blocks (the Pre-preparatory classes, Intermediate state, and Lower secondary education), that each have a specific purpose, which can be derived from their Danish terms: Indskoling roughly means to be phased into school, Mellemtrin is as in English the intermediate stage between indskoling and udskoling, which is then the opposite of indskoling, that is, to be phased out of primary school and on to something else (Undervisningsminsteriet, 28-05-2017, 28-05-2017).

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After the compulsory schooling, people can either choose to find a job or continue with an upper secondary education or vocationally oriented education and training (Ministry of Education, 13-06-2017).

As already mentioned in Chapter 1: Introduction, a Danish Literature’s Canon and a History Canon were introduced and made mandatory in Danish and History respectively in 2004 and 2006. In addition to these changes, the Danish public school was reformed in 2013 by the government at that time consisting of The Social Democratic Party, The Danish Social-Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party in collaboration with The Social-Liberal Party of Denmark and Danish People’s Party. The Reform of the Public School among other things meant that the weekly number of periods was raised for all grades, both in terms of ‘classical’ subjects such as Danish, Math, and foreign languages as well as what was termed ‘Supporting education’, which can include exercising or homework assistance (Agreement between the government (The Social Democratic Party, The Danish Social-Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party), The Liberal Party of Denmark and Danish People’s Party on an academic lift of the public school, pp. 2-7). Furthermore, the reform introduced that English should start two years earlier and that the pupils’ second foreign language should begin one year earlier, that the pupils’ development should be made measurable, an increased focus on ‘innovation and entrepreneurship’, that the pupils’ ‘pupil- and educational plan’ should be merged into one to “form the basis of organising a coherent course of udskoling, with increased focus on challenging and clarifying the pupils’ choice of education and making them ready for going through with an upper secondary education”4_{, to name some of the specific changes}

(Agreement between the government (The Social Democratic Party, The Danish Social-Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party), The Social-Liberal Party of Denmark and Danish People’s Party on an academic lift of the public school, pp. 4-13)

4_{Authors translation of: ”danne grundlag for at tilrettelægge et sammenhængende udskolingsforløb med øget}

fokus på at udfordre og afklare elevernes uddannelsesvalg og gøre dem parate til at kunne gennemføre en ungdomsuddannelse” (Agreement between the government (The Social Democratic Party, The Danish Social-Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party), The Social-Liberal Party of Denmark and Danish People’s Party on an academic lift of the public school, p. 13)

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Chapter 3:

Theoretical framework

In the Chapter 1: Introduction and the Research Question, different connections and comprehensions are already presupposed. Concepts such as culturalisation of citizenship, the state, education, nationalism or national culture and history, do however often not have unanimous and plain definitions, which is why a closer account of the links between these concepts is needed as well as what kind of world becomes visible when taking on this specific ‘set of glasses’ that a theoretical framework is. More specifically, the section below will outline and bring together theories and concepts on the state, the nation, and the specific (symbolic) power that the state is wielding, the mode of operation of the state as a bureaucratic field and the culturalisation of the relation between the state and its citizens, namely citizenship, and lastly the (re)productive and transmissive function of the educational system.

Realising the nation-state

Building on but expanding Max Weber’s famous definition of the state, Pierre Bourdieu defines it as “an X (to be determined) which successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical and symbolic violence over a defined territory and over the totality of the corresponding population” (Bourdieu, 1998). The most important addition, one Bourdieu himself put emphasise on, is the monopoly over not just physical violence, but symbolic violence as well. Symbolic violence and symbolic power differ from physical violence precisely in that their basis of operation is not coercion, but consent and recognition of their legitimacy, which for Bourdieu means that it is not recognition as a form of power (Bourdieu, 1991, pp. 163–164). At first glance, Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of symbolic power may resemble a more Marxian notion of cultural hegemony, such as Louis Althusser’s idea about the hailing or interpellation of subjects by Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), such as the educational ISA (Althusser, 2001). As it is also evident in the following section on Right-wing tilting of the

bureaucratic field and Culturalisation of Citizenship, Bourdieu wishes to move away both from a

Marxist view of hegemony and consciousness, and a Weberian view on legitimacy as a neutral, non-power, relationship (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 55–56; Bourdieu & Eagleton, 2012). Instead, “the recognition of legitimacy … is rooted in the immediate, pre-reflexive, agreement between objective structures and embodied structures, now turned unconscious” (Ibid). The conceptual

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pair, objective structures, embodied structures and their close affinity, manifests Bourdieu’s basic social ontology, as that of the realisation of social fictions and categories (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 66–67; Wacquant, 2013, pp. 275 & 281). That is, imagined categories and mental schemes get their ‘real-life’ impact by being realised (in the active sense) in representations and material properties such as citizenship rights, passports, and statistical studies. The state is the culmination and concentration of different kinds of capital (physical force, cultural, economic, and symbolic) and works to cement its power by active acts of institution (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 40-41 & 55). Through classification schemes and common principles of vision and division, inscribed in law, the educational system, social rituals, and bureaucratic procedures, the state is the producer of national identity, or even more precise a national identity, for instance by standardising language and fixating culture and history (Ibid, pp. 45-46). This institutionalising or bureaucratisation of language, culture, and history can broadly be understood as a process from diffuse symbolic capital to objectified symbolic capital, codified and guaranteed by the state (Ibid, pp. 50-51).

The perhaps most famous definition of the nation stems from Benedict Andersons book

Imagined Communities, in which he defines a nation as “an imagined political community – and

imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign.” (Anderson, 2016). Breaking his definition into smaller pieces, Anderson claims that the nation is imagined, since even in small nations such as for instance Denmark, all members will only be connected to each other through this very imagination rather than through any physical or even online contact. Additionally, the nation is built on the idea of demarcation, constituting an inside and an outside, in which the inside is constructed around solidarity and brotherhood, despite internal inequalities and power/class struggles (Ibid, p. 6-7). Just as Bourdieu claims that linguistic conventions are part of the means of the states for producing a national identity, Anderson thinks that the rise of vernacular languages combined with print-capitalism, namely the capitalist system and technologies of communications, was part and parcel of the rise and spread of nationalism and a national identity (Ibid, p. 43-44). As such, Anderson’s study of nationalism shows how symbolic capital became concentrated and in the last instance taken monopoly over by the state.

When taking into account the idea about realised social fictions, Andersons notion of the nation as an imagination is by no means the same as stating that it is without real implications and easily dismissed. Instead, precisely because it is imagined and needs the consent and reproduction in both thought and action by millions and billions of people all over

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the world, consolidated through institutions, law, emotions, everyday practices, and many other things, it is in fact neither a ‘castle build in the sky’ or an insignificant force. If taking a Bourdieusian point of view towards categories and social imaginaries, and furthermore slightly rewriting a quote, by changing family to nation and marriage to citizenship test, it becomes possible to grasp how the nation at the same time can be ‘only’ an imagination and an objective reality, that is, a realised social fiction:

“Thus the [nation] as an objective social category (a structuring structure) is the basis of the [nation] as a subjective social category (a structured structure), a mental category which is the matrix of countless representations and actions (such as [the

citizenship test]) which help to reproduce the objective social category.” (Bourdieu, 1998,

p. 67)

In light of abovementioned considerations, it might be said that the nation-state is a realised social fiction, imagined as internally equal and homogenous, that execute legitimate physical and symbolic violence over a certain territory and its inhabitants. One of the most essential ways the state is exercising this power is through pedagogical actions and the formal school system (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 35). However, before addressing the inculcation and enculturalisation of the dominant culture and history through education, it is necessary to consider some recent developments regarding nation and state in a European context, namely the developments in the culturalisation of citizenship and changes in the state’s bureaucratic field.

Right-wing tilting of the bureaucratic field and Culturalisation of

Citizenship

Neo-liberalism is often seen as the withdrawal of the state in favour of market forces and individualism, rather than civil society or citizenship ideologies. However, according to Loïc Wacquant, the recent developments are more likely to be a refashioning of the state and a right-wing tilting of its bureaucratic field, so that the state imposes the market on citizenship and civil society (Wacquant, 2012, pp. 71–74). This right-wing tilting does not refer to the political right, but to Bourdieu’s differentiation between the Left Hand of the state (the social and protective) and the Right Hand of the state (the economic and punitive), and the change is thus not (only) in the relation between state, market, and citizenship, but also (and maybe more importantly) within the state itself (Bourdieu, 2008; Wacquant, 2012, p. 73). The state

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is in Bourdieu’s and Wacquant’s view seen as a bureaucratic field, that is, a set of organisations competing over the legitimacy and monopoly of public goods:

“[It] is a space of struggle over the very perimeter, prerogatives and priorities of public authority, and in particular over what ‘social problems’ deserve its attention and how they are to be treated” (Wacquant, 2012, p. 73)

Whether an issue is perceived as a social problem or not, how to deal with the issue, and what policy responses it fosters, is a matter of collective definition (Blumer, 1971). Constituting the state as the producer of common principles of vision and division, a change internally in the bureaucratic field of the state therefore gives rise to a change in what issues are deemed problematic and how to deal with these problems. The three spheres of society; the political (the state), the economic (the market), and the social/cultural (civil society/citizenship); can each be given priority as a site of problematisation and contestation, and this is indeed what the social/cultural sphere of society has experienced in more recent years. Citizenship has in many European countries received an exceptionally great deal of attention and to be more exact, the symbolic and cultural dimension of citizenship, rather than the strictly formal economic and juridical dimensions, has been problematised in relation to immigrants and ‘older’ citizens alike. What both these concepts point to is that citizenship consists of both a formal dimension and an extra-formal, a cultural/moral dimension, meaning that new citizens need to be symbolically recognised as co-citizens and properly ‘integrated’ into society to enjoy full citizenship.

The division between the formal and the extra-formal dimensions of citizenship is first and foremost an analytical one, since for instance the paying of taxes implies a moral aspect as well as the strictly economic exchange between individual and state (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 44–45; Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010, pp. 697–698). However, the concepts of culturalisation and virtualisation of citizenship try to capture the development of how culture and morality has come to play a vital role in discussions about citizenship and do as such describe the relative weight of the cultural dimension of citizenship compared to the political and economic ones (Duyvendak et al., 2016, pp. 3–4; Schinkel & van Houdt, 2010, pp. 697– 698). Tonkens and Duyvendak outline two pairs of ideal types of culturalisation of citizenship; restorative-constructivist and functional-affective (2016, pp. 7–9). The conceptual pair of restorative-constructivist refers to two basically different views on culture, as either a fixed entity or respectively something constantly in the making. On the other hand, the conceptual

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pair of functional-affective refers to two different views on citizenship and what it entails in terms of functional skills, such as for example speaking the dominant language or knowledge of the national history and culture, or emotional requirements, such as feelings of belonging or proving the will to integrate:

The culturalisation of citizenship

Restorative Constructivist

Affective Citizens must feel at home

in the nation

Discuss clashing conceptions of belonging inside and between different cultures within nations

Functional Citizens must learn the

practical skills of citizenship

Create practices that include all citizens while respecting their citizenship rights

Figure 2: Tonkens & Duyvendak, 2016, p. 7

Tonkens & Duyvendak put forward the hypothesis, that restorative and affective notions of culturalisation obstruct the access to full citizenship, whereas constructivist and functional notions of culture and citizenship can make it easier (2016, pp. 8–9). Locating culturalisation in the discursive field as well as in the common-sensical, Paul Mepschen conceptualises culturalisation as ultimately having to do with how people perceive and act upon the world:

”Culturalism is thus conceptualized as productive of categories, frames and schemas through which people perceive the world and act upon it… It denotes a transformation in… the practical sense, at once affective, habitual, emotional and cognitive” (Mepschen, 2016, pp. 24–25)

According to Stefan Berger & Christoph Conrad, the production of a national history “has been one of the main instruments with which to construct collective national identity” (2015, p. 8) and Kirsten Thisted, who makes use of Anderson’s concept of imagined community, likewise claims that a sense of national community is not only restricted to one’s contemporaries but also to one’s national ancestors:

”It is not only in a horizontal sense that the nation state ideology encourages individuals to identify as sharing a community with people they will never meet face to face; in a vertical sense too, there is a sense of community with strangers in an age gone by” (Thisted, 2009, p. 155)

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Reflecting over the concepts of Past and History, it might prove useful to describe Past as the ‘raw material’ and History as the ‘product’ of the processing and sharpening of these ‘raw materials’. The mental schemes one possesses with respect to culture, has, in other words, great influence on how Past is turned into a specific History. The restorative view on culture and history, one that emphasises the fixity of these two concepts, can for instance be made available to people through a master narrative, such as a history or cultural canon (2016, p. 6). A master narrative is a hegemonic framing of the Past, one that both imposes a certain knowledge of ‘how things were’ and its significance to the present (and future, one might add) (Berger & Conrad, 2015, p. 11). As such, a master narrative is quite similar to Bourdieu’s concept of doxa, which is the universalised point of view of the dominant (Bourdieu, 1998). Already in 1903, Émile Durkheim & Marcel Mauss asked themselves how social organisations and institutions produce mental schemes:

“This is to the right, that is to the left; that is past, this is present; this resembles that, this accompanies that. This is about all that even the adult mind could produce if education did not inculcate ways of thinking which it could never have established by its own efforts and which are the result of an entire historical development.” (Durkheim & Mauss, 1975, p. 7)

In accordance with this way of thinking, Bourdieu claims that our spontaneous common-sense understandings, what Durkheim and Mauss term logical notions, are in themselves structured by already institutionalised mental schemes or extra-logical conditions (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 166, 1998, pp. 66–67; Durkheim & Mauss, 1975, p. 8). In abovementioned quote and in Bourdieu’s writings, education and formal schooling are seen as crucial institutions for socialising and inculcation of a certain epistemological order (Bourdieu, 1998, 35ff; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).

Education: enculturalisation and resistance

In the broadest sense, education and pedagogic action can be understood as the “methods of acquiring, transmitting, and producing knowledge for interpreting and acting upon the world” (Levinson, 2000b, p. 2). Following Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron however, the determination of what is considered valuable knowledge, exactly how it is transmitted, and to whom this specific knowledge is beneficial, makes it in fact not just a transmission of symbolic, cultural, and practical knowledge, but symbolic violence and this for two reasons (1990): Firstly, because the basis of the “imposition and inculcation of a cultural arbitrary by an arbitrary mode of imposition and inculcation (education)” is, as with Durkheim and Mauss,

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not the function of a natural or logical order, but of an extra-logical and social order, one that manifests the power relations between social classes. Secondly, because the imposition and selection, and thus consequently inclusion and exclusion, of certain meanings and knowledges reproduce the principles of vision and division, knowledges, and classification schemes of this random power relation (Ibid, 6-8). Education is in their view located between neutral communication and pure domination, as seen in Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the oppressed (1996). According to Freire, pedagogic action often takes the form of what he terms the ‘banking’ concept of teaching, where the teacher fills the pupils’ heads with knowledge, passively absorbed and accepted (Freire, 1996, 52ff). Contrary to this, Bourdieu and Passeron claim, then, that education is not inscribed on the child as a tabula rasa, but that it is a continuation and reinforcement of the already existing primary habitus and the imposition of the educational institution and system as a legitimate institution and system (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, pp. 41, 53-54). Educational systems’ function is to produce a lasting and transposable internalisation, a habitus, so that even when the direct interaction between a teacher and a student is completed, the habitus is still in effect, even in non-educational situations (Ibid, pp. 31-33):

“The social world is riddled with calls to order that function as such only for those who are predisposed to heeding them as they awaken deeply buried corporeal dispositions, outside the channels of consciousness and calculation.” (Bourdieu, 1998, pp. 54–55)

Education is in abovementioned sense always culturalised, however, a possible way to differentiate between different kinds of education may then be to determine what kind of culture (restorative, constructivist, functional, or affective) the educational system is trying to impose on the students and reproduce. Indeed, as Bourdieu and Passeron write: “it is one thing to teach ‘cultural relativism’ … it would be quite another to claim to be giving a relativistic education” (1990, p. 12). However, as much empirical work has shown, there is no one-to-one relationship between culture and personality, culture and symbolic systems are not just passively absorbed by students, it is also redefined and modified in the process (Levinson, 2000a, pp. 15–16; Spindler, 1963, pp. 35–38). In a Dutch context, Paul Mepschen as well as Oskar Verkaaik have both demonstrated how nationalist-culturalist discourse, policies, and rituals do not necessarily lead to ‘ordinary’ people or municipal bureaucrats passively taking over the said discursive formation (Mepschen, 2016; Verkaaik, 2010). Following Mepschen, despite the immense symbolic maintenance-work being done in The Netherlands in relation to fixating culture, resistance in the form of counter-discourses demonstrates how ‘ordinary’

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people and their everyday perceptions are not totally superseded by this imposition of a certain discourse (2016, pp. 20-31, 161ff). Investigating the Dutch naturalisation ceremony, Verkaaik shows how the institutionalisation and ritualisation of a nationalist discourse, even though ideologically alien to many municipal bureaucrats, slowly becomes “accepted, learned to live with, or even appropriated” (2010, p. 70). What this furthermore shows is how bureaucrats can internalise ideology and practices, and in particular how practices can be internalised despite ideological disagreement:

“The bureaucratic self is an acting self, that is, a self that, in the daily practice of meaningful work, develops cultural competence by learning and internalizing its conventional forms to the point of mastering them… the effect of nationalism increases when it ceases to be mere discourse and becomes embedded in the ritualized behavior of everyday life.” (Verkaaik, 2010, p. 80)

This way of conceptualising structure and agency, or symbolic power and bureaucratic action, takes into account the vital importance of state power and official policies in producing (culturalised) mental schemes, categories, and practices as well as the fact that people alter and appropriate these acts of symbolic power differently and in a more or less critical way.

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Chapter 4:

Methodology

The use of theory and its relation to the world can sometimes be an almost violent undertaking, if a theory is taken as the gospel truth without further ado. Instead, the relationship between theory and empirical knowledge is the constant struggle to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis: between not letting a single diverging empirical appearance disprove a theory altogether and not trying to force all empirical observations into a theory, if they do not fit. A more fruitful way of going about the relationship between theory and empirical data is, in my view, to see the research process as a more inductive and hermeneutic endeavour. The questions one asks, the way one approaches the field, and the theoretical framework one tries to apply to the empirical world are open for modifications, as the process unfolds, and only becomes meaningful when further knowledge is gained in the encounter with the world:

“we come to the field with presuppositions, questions, and frameworks but that they are more like prisms than templates and they are emergent rather than fixed” (Burawoy, 1998, p. 11).

Theory and empirical data are not mutually exclusive, rather they can strengthen each other and help bridge the micro and the macro level, the unique and the general, and connect the past with the present and the future (Ibid, p. 5).

Policy documents

As mentioned in the section Realising the nation-state, Bourdieu and Wacquant view the state as a site for struggle over public resources and priorities, and over which social issues are deemed worthy of the state’s gaze and how they are to be treated. In line with this way of thinking, Herbert Blumer claims that social problems and their perceived solution are a product of collective definition, rather than a response to an actual objective social dysfunction (1971). According to Blumer, a social problem moves though five stages of collective definition; the emergence of the problem, its legitimation, mobilisation of action, the formation of an official plan, and the implementation of that plan (Ibid, pp. 301-305). What is crucial in Blumer’s conceptualisation of social problems is that as a problem moves from emergence to implementation, and even between each stage, it changes, is redefined, and reassembled in a

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different way (Ibid, p. 304). The formulation of an official plan, say, a social policy, is thus best seen as something constantly in the making, as “a process rather than a thing”5_{(Clarke, Bainton,}

Lendvai, & Stubbs, 2015, pp. 9–10). The term ‘collective definition’ does not necessary imply coherence and agreement however (Blumer, 1971, p. 304). Instead, policies and social issues take the form of meaning-making processes and discursive struggles, expressing both values, feelings, beliefs, and emotions: Ultimately, they articulate “claims about how the world is and about how it ought to be” (Jenkins quoted in: Clarke et al., 2015, p. 18) (Blumer, 1971, p. 304; Clarke et al., 2015, pp. 17–20; Shore & Wright, 1997, p. 6). Additionally, policies can be seen, with a concept from Marcel Mauss, as “…‘total social phenomena’ as they have important economic, legal, cultural and moral implications, and can create whole new sets of relationships between individuals, groups and objects” (Shore & Wright, 1997, p. 6). In this way, it becomes possible to investigate policies as temporary crystallisations of meaning and collective definition, as a cultural text, but also as something intrinsically contested and constructed (Shore & Wright, 1997, p. 11). Policies are however also violent interventions into people’s lives, as they are being categorised, subjectified, and habitually inscribed with a certain set of emotions and values (Clarke et al., 2015, p. 9; Shore & Wright, 1997, p. 4).

To be able to determine and test whether the observed changes and stabilities in a policy is not just an isolated incident, different policy documents, reports, and other official documents will be included in the analysis. More specifically, the thesis will scrutinise and analyse the following documents:

The Law on Public School (Folkeskoleloven) o CIR nr 143 af 22/08/1975 (Historic) o LBK nr 438 af 20/06/1989 (Historic) o LBK nr 747 af 20/06/2016 (Present)

Consolidation Acts on examination form and Examination Instruction

o Consolidation Act on the public school’s examinations (BEK nr 1132 af 25/08/2016)

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18 Common Goals (Fælles Mål)

o Announcement of purpose, goals of competence, and goals of skills- and knowledge for the subjects and topics of the public school (Common Goals) (BEK nr 663 af 18/05/2015 – Present)

o Common Goals for the subject of History (Fællesmål for faget historie) (Present) Syllabus and other

o Agreement between the government (The Social Democratic Party, The Danish Social-Liberal Party, and the Socialist People’s Party), The Liberal Party of Denmark and Danish People’s Party on an academic lift of the public school o The Danish Literature’s Canon (Dansk Litteraturs kanon) (2004)

o Report from the committee of the strengthening of history in the public school (June 2006)

o Syllabus for the subject of History (Læseplan for faget historie)

Despite the fact that the starting point for examining culturalisation of citizenship and education in Denmark are a number of recent policy documents on said issues, an ethnography of policies cannot draw final conclusions based only on the discursive and semiotic articulations conveyed in official text and speech. Instead, taking policies as ‘total social phenomena’, this thesis will approach policy studies from a more holistic or multi-sited angle, to be able to discover concurrence, contestation, and re-articulation:

“ ‘studying through’ [contrary to ‘studying down’ or ‘studying up’] entails multi-site ethnographies which trace policy connections between different organizational and everyday worlds, even where actors in different sites do not know each other or share a moral universe. However, unlike the postmodernist emphases on the ‘poetics’ and ‘polyphony’ of ‘multi-locale ethnographic texts’… this approach treats ‘policy communities’ as not just rhetorical, but contested political spaces” (Shore & Wright, 1997, p. 11)

Therefore, a discussion of more ‘classical’ ethnographic methods, interviewing and participant-observation is necessary before engaging in the analysis of the collected empirical data.

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Semi-structured and ethnographic interviews

Despite being a very important one, the study of policy documents is but one step in the process of the development of a social issue, one that examines the temporary solidification of meaning in written form. First of all, the temporary solidification does not entail that the issue is concluded and closed. A policy moves both ‘forth’ and ‘back’ between the different stages of (re)emergence, legitimation, mobilisation of action, official plan for action, and implementation. New actors try to reformulate the issue or add new items to the official plan, and the policy is implemented by street-level bureaucrats, somewhere between bureaucratic loyalty and vocational conviction. Street-level bureaucrats are seen Michael Lipsky by as the government officials who delivers the policies and who have everyday encounter with the citizens (2010, pp. 3ff). As such, they “mediate aspects of the constitutional relationship of citizens to the state” (Ibid, p. 4). At the same time, policies come ‘from above’, constituting a framework for the possible actions of street-level bureaucrats and can account for a certain degree of standardisation in policy delivery (Ibid, p. 14). To explain how the official policy of the public school is being negotiated by street-level bureaucrats and redefined by non-state actors, it is however necessary to take a step further down into the ethnographic world of said non-state actors and street-level bureaucrats by engaging in a conversation and discussion of their practises. Semi-structured and ethnographic interviews differ in two significant ways: the degree of structure and what kind of data they each generate. In this thesis, the semi-structured interview was used in the interview with two employees from the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen, Søren Thalund and Martine Lind Krebs, and a more ethnographic approach, with aspects of the semi-structured interview, was chosen for the interviews with two history teachers, Carsten Gregers Mortensen from Brobyskolen and Ulrik Vestergaard Jensen from Rantzausminde skole.

The interview with the two employees from the Greenlandic House about their web-based educational material DagensGrønland.dk (TodaysGreenland.dk) was conducted on Tuesday the 16th_{of May 2017 in a conference room in the Greenlandic House in Copenhagen.}

I was offered to interview Søren Thalund and Martine Lind Krebs at the same time, since Søren had been part of the initiation and first phases of the production of DagensGrønland.dk and Martine is the one keeping the material up-to-date, producing new themes for the webpage, and who primarily has had contact with and received feedback from teachers, students, and headmasters. As Harvey Russell Bernard states, the semi-structured interview is especially useful when one is having restricted time and, not least, when one is having a

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clear end-goal with the interview and the knowledge that one hopes to generate about a specific topic (Bernard, 2006, p. 212). As the interview with Søren and Martine had the very clear objective of generating knowledge about how these actors and the institution they represent see and utilise culture and history, and how a specific educational intervention, that is, the initiation and production of new representational and educational materials about Greenland and the Greenlandic people, negotiate and influence the field of Danish national culture and history, the interview needed to be executed with a clear, however still open, structure and interview guide.

Unlike the interview with Søren and Martine, the interviews with the two history teachers took the form of unstructured and open-ended, ethnographic interviewing, where the progress of the interviews was dictated largely by classroom observations and by the teacher’s everyday experiences. To be more specific, both interviews proceeded, in outline, as follows: I met the teacher shortly before their history lesson started, both in an 8th_{grade, and got}

informed on the topic and on the plan for the days class. After that, we went to the classroom where the teacher introduced the plan for the day and I introduced myself to the class. Since my visits coincided with the pupils having to do group-based project work at Brobyskolen and play a historical ‘game’ at Rantzausminde skole, and the teachers thus were not teaching in a traditional sense, I was free to interview/converse with the teacher during and after the class. Claiming that these interviews were ethnographic rather than semi-structured, I still brought an ‘interview guide’ (or list of possible topics to cover) – which I hardly used – to the interviews and did record parts of the conversation, with Carsten during the actual class and with Ulrik after the class. Still, both interviews were in large part steered by the teachers’ everyday experiences and their thoughts about the purpose of history as an educational subject and the transformations it has undergone in recent years. The difference between the semi-structured interview at the Greenlandic House and these ethnographic interviews, is that whereas the first could be understood as a more positivist approach of ‘extracting’ knowledge from the interviewees, the second kind of interviewing is built on a dialogical concept of mutual receptiveness, which essential implies that the conversation can take many unexpected turns (Heyl, 2001, pp. 370–371).

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Chapter 5:

Analysis

The following chapter on the findings and results of this research, combines the former chapters (Chapter 2: The Danish Case, Chapter 3: Theoretical Framework, and Chapter 4:

Methodology) with the generated empirical data in an analysis on different views on culture

and citizenship, the use of history and culture by different actors, and the room to manoeuvre made possible for different actors within the field of Danish history writing and its representation. The result is a three-part analysis corresponding to and organised according to the three sub-questions. First part of the analysis, Canonised Danish culture and history: A

policy analysis, deals with the fixations of Danish national culture and history in a range of

different policy documents on public education and the educational subjects of history and Danish. The second part of the analysis, The Greenlandic struggle for representation, deals with the question of cultural representation and how non-state actors can engage with and refashion the official national history writing and representation. The third and last part of the analysis, History teachers in the Danish public school: Semi-autonomous bureaucrats, looks at the space for action that the history teachers in the Danish public school experience and how they conform or contest the policies that they are employed and paid to execute in relation to they own professional competencies.

Canonised Danish culture and history: A policy analysis

Policy documents and other official documents are as already mentioned best seen as statements of intent and not as already finished products – rather, policies are made at all levels of the political system, from the active acts of institution by the parliament to the implementation by the street-level bureaucrats in their everyday practices. These policy documents should however display something about the intentions of the democratic representatives and their underlying views on culture, history, and citizenship. As a result, the analysis will open up with an investigation of the changes in public school policies, with a focus on citizenship, culturalisation, and canonisation. By looking at different policy documents such as reports commissioned by the ministry, The Law on Public School, syllabuses, consolidation acts on examinations, and so on, a more nuanced look on developments as well as antagonisms within the bureaucratic field of the state becomes visible.

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The purpose of the public school in The Law on Public School

The first two paragraphs in The Law on Public School, respectively from 1989 and 2016, outline the objectives and purposes of public schools. In The Law on Public School 1989 it is emphasised that the public school, in cooperation with the parents of the child, should give the pupils opportunity to “acquire knowledges, skills, working methods, and modes of expression, that contribute to the all-around development of the pupil”6_{. In The Law on Public}

School 2016, this single objective has been supplemented by other objectives that state that the public school should: “prepare them [the pupils] for further education and make them want to learn more, make them familiar with Danish culture and history, [and] give them an

understanding of other countries and cultures…”7_{. Another, minor, change is from that “the}

school’s teachings and entire everyday life must therefore be based on liberty of mind and democracy”8_{to “the schools function must therefore be characterised by liberty of mind, equal}

status, and democracy”9_{. As seen in the new objectives, particularly regarding culture and}

history, there is a distinction between the pupils’ ‘own’ culture and other ‘foreign’ ones. This distinction is also present in the distinction between the subject of christianity and other religions, both in The Law on Public School 1989 and The Law on Public School 2016. All pupils are educated in christianity education, that is to say, the national Evangelical Lutheran Church of Denmark, except if the custody of the child chooses to exempt the pupil and undertake the responsibility for the child’s religious education themselves. Only in Intermediate stage or Lower secondary education is “foreign religions and other outlooks on life” (LBK nr 747 af 20/06/2016, cap. 2, §6) part of the schooling and is clearly categorised together with “other countries and cultures” (LBK nr 747 af 20/06/2016, cap. 1, §1) in the objectives of the public school, as something foreign and different from the pupil’s ‘own’ culture, religion, and history. Christianity has been an educational subject in the Danish public school for many years and both in ‘The Ordinance on the Schools in the Countryside in Denmark, 23. January 1739’ and in ‘The Announcement on the Goal for the Education in the Public School, 24. May 1941’, christianity is mentioned and described as the first subject

6_{Authors translation of: ”tilegne sig kundskaber, færdigheder, arbejdsmetoder og udtryksformer, som medvirker}

til den enkelte elev alsidige udvikling”. (LBK nr 438 af 20/06/1989, cap. 1, § 2)

7_{Authors translation of: ”forbereder dem til videre uddannelse og giver dem lyst til at lære mere, gør dem}

fortrolige med dansk kultur og historie, give dem forståelse for andre lande og kulturer…” (LBK nr 747 af 20/06/2016, cap. 1, § 1). Authors emphasis in translation.

8_{Authors translation of: ”Skolens undervisning of hele dagligliv må derfor bygge på åndsfrihed og demokrati”.}

(LBK nr 438 af 20/06/1989, cap. 1, § 2, subsection 3)

9_{Authors translation of: ”Skolens virke skal derfor være præget af åndsfrihed, ligeværd og demokrati”. (LBK nr}

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(Aarhus University, 05-07-2017; Aarhus University, 07-07-2017). What has changed, however, in ‘The Circular letter on execution of law on the public school’ from 1975 is the introduction of “foreign religions and other outlooks on life”, thereby reinforcing what had been evident for many years: That christianity is the pupils ‘own’ culture and other religions are not (retsinformation.dk, 09-07-2017). What the example with christianity shows is the fact that education is always culturalised to a certain degree. The more recent additions to the purpose of the public school on the other hand illustrate, that the idea about a certain national Danish culture as the basis for the identity and life world of the pupils has been reinforced.

The distinction between Danish culture and other cultures does not in itself imply anything about the specific content of Danish culture and history. In order to be able to survey what kind of culturalisation is being institutionalised and which relation to their ‘own’ culture and that of the other culture the pupils are supposed to have, it is furthermore necessary to take a closer look at two of the most obvious culture-bearing subjects in public schools and, if we are to take Berger & Conrad’s as well as Bourdieu’s words for it, two of the primary ways of constructing a legitimate national identity and culture: History and history of literature, which in this context of course is Danish (Berger & Conrad, 2015, p. 8; Bourdieu, 1998, p. 46).

The Danish History Canon 2006

In June 2006, the Report from the committee of the strengthening of history in the public school completed their commissioned work and outlined their recommendations of how history as an educational subject could be strengthened, among other things in relation to the weighting of Danish history compared to non-Danish history and history as a then newly established examination subject. The background for the report was among other things that the government did not feel that pupils in the public school were “familiar with the stories from Danish history and that their do not have sufficient knowledge of other nation’s history”10_.

This led the then Minister of Education Bertel Haarder to appoint a committee of 9 experts to evaluate and make recommendations regarding history as an educational subject and by request of Bertel Haarder, the committee recommended the content of a canon for history consisting of 29 items (Report from the committee of the strengthening of history in the public

10_{Authors translation of: ”fortrolige med fortællingerne fra Danmarks historie, og at de ikke har tilstrækkeligt}

kendskab til andre nationers historie”. (Report from the committee of the strengthening of history in the public school, 2006, p. 3). Authors emphasis in translation.

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school, p. 19). This recommended canon is almost exactly the one that is now being used in the present Common Goals for the subject of History, with only two items replaced11_:

The Danish History Canon 2006

Ertebølle culture Tutankhamon

The Sun Chariot of Trundholm Emperor Augustus

Jelling Stones Absalon

The Kalmar Union Columbus

The Reformation King Christian the 4th

The Westphalian Peace The coup d’etat 1660 The abolition of serfdom Storming of the Bastille The abolition of slave trade

The Danish Constitution 1849 The bombardment of Copenhagen Storming of Dybbøl 1864

The battle on Fælleden

The change of political system 1901 Women’s suffrage

Reunification 1920

The Kanslergade Agreement

The August uprising and the rescue of the Danish Jews UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The energy crisis 1973 The fall of the Berlin wall Maastricht 1992

9/11

These items vary between events or persons that are deemed important in many, especially European, countries such as ‘The Reformation’ or ‘9/11’, and events or persons that are important only in a Danish context, such as ‘Jelling stones’ or ‘The Kanslergade Agreement’. The items in the canon should according to the committee “represent significant ruptures or changes or they have a symbolic value”12_.

Two items, ‘The abolition of slave trade’ and ‘The August uprising and the rescue of the Danish Jews’, has an especially important symbolic value in a Danish context, since they work as an affirmation of Denmark as a benevolent and humanistic nation, an exception in the course of history. According to Kirsten Thisted, writing extensively on the relationship between Denmark and Greenland, precisely these two events have become schematic narrative

templates in Danish collective remembrance (2009, 153, 163). Such a template is described as a

narrative that people “draw on more or less automatically, partly because they are transparent and banal, and partly because the narratives in question still offer support for the narrator’s identity construction” (Ibid). In continuation of this line of thinking, Ann Stoler states that in

11_{’Globalisation’ is replaced with ’ The change of political system 1901’ and ’29th of August 1943’ changed name}

to The August uprising and the rescue of the Danish Jews’.

12_{Authors translation of: ”repræsenterer væsentlige brud eller forandringer eller de har en symbolværdi” (Report}

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relation to colonial history, a colonial aphasia is often observed. Both concepts referring to medical conditions, aphasia differs importantly from amnesia in that whereas amnesia refers to a total loss of memory, aphasia describes a difficulty with connecting the right vocabular with the appropriate things, an interruption in the ‘systems of association’ (Stoler, 2011, pp. 124-125, 148). The schematic narrative template of the canon item ‘The abolition of slave trade’ clearly demonstrates an occurrence of colonial aphasia: according to Lars Jensen, the customary reaction when discussing Danish colonial history alters between refusing that Denmark was ever a colonial power and, when acknowledges that Denmark was a colonial power, insisting on that the Danish colonial project was so self-sacrificing and benevolent that it was actually more good than bad (2016, p. 445). Many Danish postcolonial scholars do indeed agree that Denmark was the first country to end transatlantic slave transport in 1803, but not slavery as an institution before 1848, a while after for instance England (Jensen, 2016, pp. 441–445; Thisted, 2009, p. 153). Adding to this, the total abolition of slavery in the Danish colonies only happened after some slave-based revolts in the former Danish West Indies and can thus not be said to refer directly to Danish humanism and benevolence but to the struggles for freedom by the former slaves (Jensen, 2016, pp. 441–442). When only focussing on the end of the slave trade, it could easily be forgotten why slave trade needed to be abolished in the first place as well as the fact that, with the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed” (1963).

Decontextualising ‘The abolition of slave trade’ and ‘The August uprising and the rescue of the Danish Jews’ from their contexts, that is Danish colonial (not forgetting postcolonial) history and Second World War, the history canon tries to inculcate not just certain historical events or periods of time, but also already the interpretation of these events. Colonial aphasia in relation to the Danish colonial past is likewise present in the current Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen’s New Year’s Speech from 2017, where he commented on the 100-year commemoration of the selling of the Danish West Indies and tried to let (this particular) past remain past:

“This year it is 100 years since Denmark sold the West Indies to the USA. And put a closure to a grim chapter in our history.

Many of Copenhagen’s beautiful old houses and mansions were built for money earned on the toil and exploitation of slaves on the opposite side of earth.

It is not a proud part of the History of Denmark. It is shameful. And it is luckily in the past.

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Today the Danes fight against oppression. For freedom. And that we can be proud of.”13

Whether the colonial heritage is dead and buried probably depends on whether one used to be a coloniser or colonised. The riches that the beautiful houses and mansions of Copenhagen symbolise stayed in Denmark as well as the price the Danish state was paid at the conveyance of the island to the USA.

Holding together the objectives of the public school and the history canon, Carsten Tage Nielsen believes that the history canon is a fundamentally different way of thinking history, one that originates not from the democratic purpose of the school, but rather of a culture of evaluation running through the public and educational sector, manifested by the extensive focus on the (in)famous Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) (2008, pp. 171–179). Whereas the canon represents a rather restorative-functional way of culturalisation, in the syllabus for the subject of history other forms of culturalisation are represented, too. One element in the skill- and knowledge objectives for pupils’ in the public school is the use of history, namely how different persons are influenced by and use history, and the interplay between past, present, and future. Additionally, in the syllabus for the subject of history, a more constructivist notion of history is utilised, saying that “[h]istory is also used to establish and strengthen the cohesion in real and imagined communities”14_and

“[h]istoric narratives are normally constructed and used with specific purposes in mind”15_.

Concepts such as the narrative’s memory-political aim stress the constructivist aspect of history, namely that culture and history are not just ‘out there’ waiting to be discovered and unfolded, but are instead the crystallisation of a process of analysis and often used as a way to further own’s cause and identity construction. The cardinal methodology of history, source criticism, is as well mentioned as an integrated part of every subject and theme in all years of the pupils’ history lessons. These constructivist notions of culture and history do not, however, seem to challenge the introduction of a history canon and not least one that so clearly already

13_{Authors translation of: ” I år er det 100 år siden, Danmark solgte de Vestindiske Øer til USA. Og satte et}

punktum for et grusomt kapitel i vores historie.

Mange af Københavns smukke gamle huse og palæer blev opført for penge tjent på slavers slid og udbytning på den anden side af jorden.

Det er ikke en stolt del af Danmarkshistorien. Det er skamfuldt. Og det er heldigvis fortid. I nutiden kæmper danskere mod undertrykkelse. For frihed. Og det kan vi være stolte af.” (2017)

14_{Authors translation of: ”Historie bruges også til at etablere og styrke sammenhængskraften i reelle og}

forestillede fællesskaber” (Syllabus for the subject of History)

15_{Authors translation of: ”Historiske fortællinger er som regel konstrueret og brugt med et bestemt formål for}