Danish learning traditions in the context of the European Union

Abstract

The European Union is a paradoxical construct. Throughout its existence it has built on an uneasy mix of economic and political functions and strategies. Although it was conceived partly as a way of overcoming inter-nation tensions and securing peace, the emphasis was for many years on the economic collaboration and the benefits of market integration. Although governments and administrations of the member countries were involved more and more in collaboration and decision-making, much of this work was and is still regarded as a redistribution game, where individual countries and their trades and institutions try to get a little more than their ‘own’ share of the pooled resources. Even after it chose to call itself a ‘union’ instead of a ‘market’, the EU has continued to be held together and legitimated mainly by the medium of money. But this is changing. For the last decade the EU has definitely been moving towards a stronger political identity, closer coordination in all policy areas and a higher level of cultural commonality. There are many reasons for this, and I will not try to analyse them here. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the uneasiness in many European countries about a political world order dominated by the USA are certainly important factors, but so are processes of social and cultural modernisation that manifest themselves in most European countries. Where the present developments of the EU will lead is by no means certain; conflicts between the major players surface from time to time, and the ambitious project of expansion may loose its support among the old members. But the present trend is that EU legislation and discourse influences and interacts increasingly with day-to-day decisions and debates in the member states. This is quite evident in the area of education. National systems, policies and practices of education are shaped by many factors; but they often have a distinctive character reflecting the specific pattern of cultural elements in the individual nation. For instance English education reflects a specific kind of liberalism while French education reflects a specific kind of republicanism (Osborn et al., 2003). When the EU tries to develop and implement union-wide educational strategies, these become a forum for interaction between different concepts of education. The EU policy texts draw on, combine and filter educational discourses that have different meanings and standings in the individual nations; and in turn the EU policies re-introduce the resultant discourses in the different national educational contexts. The topic of this paper is the interaction of EU strategies with the national educational context in Denmark. I shall focus especially on the area of adult education and learning. Following the introduction I sketch out the roots and development of the Danish EU membership. In the following two sections I present some main characteristics of adult education traditions in Denmark and their evolution in a modernising society. This society is increasingly influenced by the EU, and in the two following sections I turn to EU policies on lifelong learning and their implications for citizenship. I then return to Danish adult education, outline the most recent reform and discuss its relationship to EU policy. Finally I summarise the impact of EU learning discourse on Danish adult education traditions and discuss the prospects of these traditions.