The clash of cultures: Individualization and standardization in education

In this essay, we argue that pupils in compulsory school education seem to be exposed to conflicting pressures from an (internal) tendency towards individualisation and an (external) tendency towards standardisation. Drawing on Luc Bolanski and Laurent Thévenot’s pragmatic sociology of orders of worth, we develop a theoretical framework to discuss the two conflicting cultures. In the first part of the analysis, we present the broad and enhanced tendency towards individualisation in terms of methods and content in Norwegian compulsory education – the construction of an inspirational pupil – and in the second part of the analysis, we present the development of standards for assessment – the construction of an industrial pupil. In the final section we discuss two forms of processes – individualisation and standardisation – rooted in two incompatible orders of worth, the inspirational and industrial order, respectively, and argue that these processes represent a major challenge in schools, a conflicting pressure to which pupils are being subjected.