agency for the teachers to interpret and enforce, allowing them significant auton-
omy, although with little support and backup from the government. National
concerns, regarding globalisation in the 1990 s though, led to an impoverishing of
teacher agency through their losing autonomy to centralised control over curricu-
lum, teaching methods and subject matters. Teachers were expected to be scripted
agents of a detailed national curriculum. A political counter-reaction to the politics
of openness was initiated in parallel to the need to master it goals. The double focus
on both a global and a national discourse created paradoxical agencies for teachers.
This paradoxical political reaction can be explained using Popper’( 1995 ) classical
theory of the open society and the typical counter-reactions to it.
InThe Open Society,Popper not only forms the arguments of the need for an
open society, he also identifies typical reactionary reflexes and the restorative
policies that can occur as a reaction against this openness and relativism (Trippestad
2009 ). These counteractions are also interesting when it comes to understanding the
kind of agency nation-states try to implement as a means of managing teachers’
reactions to globalisation and openness. Popper diagnoses typical destructive or
critical reactions to openness, which also seem to be traits that characterise edu-
cational policies in many countries during the 1990s and 2000s. Thefirst reaction is
an attempt to arrest change by values and cultures of the past. The other
counter-reaction looks to control future development by planning, science and
carrying out social experiments on a grand scale. Often these two reactions com-
bine. Popper names both these reactions asutopian social engineering. Utopian
social engineering uses strong regulations to control the way in which agents
implement their discourses. They are either obligated to play the role of rhetorical
agents of a tribal or nationalistic culture that involves the task of arresting devel-
opment, or they are obligated to play the role of scripted rhetorical agents of a
quasi-scientific planning regime promising to lead countries into desired
future-states.
Popper claims utopian engineering to be an archetypical, philosophical, organ-
isational and political reaction to Heraklit’sinflux: to the notion that all there is, is
in movement, is changing or is in a state of transition. Knowledge, power or
governing no longer express clear objectives or sovereign ground within the
epistemological domain. On the upside, this means a society is more open to debate,
democracy and individualism. But these paradigmatic intellectual changes also
mean that society is more uncertain of itself. So openness creates tensions and
feelings of risk in relation to a need for control. Such tensions can be easily
identified in Norwegian policies over the last 20 years. But they also seem to be
typical national responses to the openness of globalisation the world over.
According to an article by Wang Jianjun, these tensions seem to be an important
experience with the“reform and opening-up policy”in Chinese curriculum reforms
During the 30 years after the‘reform and opening-up policy’was announced in 1978,
curriculum reform in Mainland China has been continuously facing the tension between the
demand of change pushed by the changing domestic and international context, and the
cultural and ideological tradition–old and new. (Wang 2010 ,p.1)362 T.A. Trippestad