Children’s existential questions–recognized in Scandinavian curricula, or not?

Abstract

Do curricular texts address children’s existential questions and how are such questions to be met in school? This is the crucial question of this study. It consists of a comparative content analysis of Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish national curricula for religious education, in use in 2019. To provide a background to this content analysis the varying and shifting ways in which Swedish curricula from 1969 up to 2011 expressed ‘livsfrågor’ and educational responses to them have been studied. As a new theme ‘livsfrågor’, meaning existential questions, was introduced in 1969 in the Swedish curriculum for compulsory school. A comparison of the Scandinavian curricula of today shows that the Danish one most explicitly addresses the importance of children’s existential questions; the Norwegian subtly emphasizes a dialogue with school children; while the Swedish syllabus links existential questions to worldviews, general systems of thought, and not to addressing students’ own questions. In the characterization of the curricula, two curricular codes, a proclamatory and a dialogical, as suggested by Hartman, and the three purposes of education by Biesta (qualification, socialisation, and subjectification)  have been used. Although it studies students’ existential questions in religious education, this study contributes towards general didactical discussions on the role of children’s questions and possible educational responses to them.