Tänka fritt, tänka rätt. En studie om värdeöverföring och kritiskt tänkande i gymnasieskolans undervisning

This thesis deals with value transfer and critical thinking in Swedish upper secondary education. The Curriculum for the Non-Compulsory School System (Lpf 94) entrusts a dual function to schools and teachers. They are tasked with, first, conveying to pupils, con-solidating and transferring values that underpin our community life and, second, foster-ing pupils’ critical thinking and independent attitudes towards issues relating to life and values. The present study investigates and problematises tensions in schools and the teaching situation between value transfer and the pupils’ training in critical thinking. The theoretical framework of this thesis centres on the academic perspectives and work originated, and provided with tools, by Michel Foucault, Norman Fairclough, Valerie Walkerdine and Stephen Ball. This study was inspired by ethnographic method and tradition. The empirical approach of the thesis is based on fieldwork carried out at three upper secondary schools. The overall finding is that, for the majority of pupils in the study, a subject position is made available with very limited scope for criticism and questioning. The pupils’ room for manoeuvre is limited mainly through articulations of an order discourse and a knowledge-reproducing discourse. For pupils, the order discourse normalises an attitude characterised by approval, docility, compliance and loyalty in relation to the school and to what the school asks its pupils to do. It is typical of pupils in the knowledge-reproducing discourse that docility and compliance are also expected to include actual knowledge content and, by the same token, the versions of the truth that it dictates. The discourses combine to place pupils in a subordinate posi-tion in relation both to the school, teachers and ways of working and to the knowledge content. When the order discourse and/or the knowledge-reproducing discourse is articulated, the pupil gets no training in questioning, critically oriented activity, nor any encouragement or persuasion to engage in it. The only example of planned training in critical reflection that was observed in the fieldwork was in a traditional academic programme