The attempt to arrest change is, according to Popper ( 1995 ) often based on a notion
of development and change as a form of decay of an original shape or golden age of
a society or a state. The typical goal of restorative policies is to bring society back
to its original shape and/or its golden age. This isthe arrested state,where there is
an attempt to bring development and movement under control through the use of
the historical ideals and values. The safety of religion, collectivism, law and order,
myths, traditions and group commitments are typical ingredients in these attempts
to master the feeling of risk and uncertainty that can preoccupy an open society.
In Norwegian educational policies of the late 1980s and 1990s, such reactions
were typically a part of rhetoric, diagnosis and policymaking. As reactions to what
Peters ( 2010 ) names as the exercising of technologies of openness, one sees
emerging dramas and metaphors describing the existing conditions in policy doc-
uments as being representative of decay and threats. A clear withdrawal to religious
and national metaphors, myths and authoritarianfigures comes into play.
In a foreword to the bookDen digitale revolusjonen(The Digital Revolution),
Gudmund Hernes, the Church, Education and Science minister at the time, claimed
that the geopolitical notion of the nation was weakened by the new technological
revolution and the new global public. In his opinion, the significance of both time
and place are reduced within the context in which opinion-making takes place.
A political diagnosis within this regime reacted against exactly the state Peters
names as a techno-political economy of openness.
We are, in fact, in a new technological revolution, which again creates tension between the
base and the superstructure. [...] Technically, soonfilms, music, books, journals and paper
can be directly distributed from producer to consumer. [...] This reduces the economic
significance of time and space. The systems that bind people together are not connected to
physical space. People can, to an increasing extent, work anywhere; communicate inde-
pendently of working hours, between organisations and across national borders. [...]
Funnily enough, it seems that people become more nationalistic the less the nation, as an
organisation, is capable of being sovereign over the technology that shapes our lives. The
problem is, therefore, how to gain sovereignty at a different level. (Hernes 1995 , pp. 25–26,
authors translation)On the basis of the diagnosis that globalisation causes the formation of a heterodox
situation at national level, an important political strategy that has to do with the will
to gain central control over national identity and common culture emerges. This
politics of the new knowledge society was, in part, understood as a state of mind.
Teachers were required to be obedient and loyal rhetorical agents for the new
knowledge society. First, this rhetoric obligation could be seen in the demands
made on teachers in higher education. It was a typical restorative and conservative
knowledge reaction. Knowledge policy demanded focus on core knowledge to
control and arrest the negative effects of influx. One of the most important dramas
and threats is the notion of the knowledge explosion. The new and massive pro-
duction of knowledge threatens basic understanding, classical science and the
common reference ground.
24 The Paradox of Teacher Agency in a Glocalised World 363