Bringing teaching back in: The Norwegian NOU The school of the future in light of the Allgemeine Didaktik theory of Wolfgang Klafki

Sammendrag

This paper discusses possible knowledge-related challenges in the Norwegian NOU report, entitled The school of the future (2015), in light of the Allgemeine Didaktik theory of Wolfgang Klafki. Why German Didaktik is relevant to the development of future-oriented curriculum theory is firstly explained in relation to the future prospects and concepts of knowledge recently theorised by Michael Young and colleagues. Klafki’s concepts of material-, formal- and categorical Bildung are used to analyse the epistemology inherent in the NOU report’s vision of the curriculum. The paper finds that the main knowledge-related challenge in the report is the subordination of content knowledge to competences, creating a risk of the dominance of formal aspects of Bildung, which can devalue knowledge, and lead to elitism and deprofessionalisation.