As Sweden drew nearer to the 2006 national election, two themes emerged in the educational debate: a concern for order and discipline in schools, and the ambition to raise educational levels of achievement. The objective of this article is to locate these two themes within a broader framework of understanding by: 1) discussing examples of how the reinforcement of disciplinary power in schools was introduced, justified and deployed by right-wing constellations during this time; and 2) to relate these policy changes to both a Foucauldian theory of power and to current discussions on performativity, assessment and governmentality. Considered as attempts to locate students, teachers and schools within networks of performativity, thereby strengthening the image of Sweden as a "performing knowledge nation", we argue that these policy changes have a much closer relationship with the art of "perception management" than with any genuine interest in education for human proficiency.

It would be futile, John Dewey argued in 1902, to think that we have to choose between child-centered, progressive education and traditional, subject-matter-oriented approaches. Calling for adaptivity, he stressed that we need the act of balancing the one with the other. The tendency in current educational policy to lean in favor of traditional, disciplinary modes of control appears to lose sight of this need. The aim of this paper is to reconnect to the task of maintaining a balance between educational freedom and structure, using a variety of theoretical resources such as complexity science, and the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari, Schiller, and Nietzsche. Based on these resources, the authors also discuss Steiner Waldorf education as an example of how educational practice may approach, and integrate the significance of chaos in the form of a “virtual pedagogy”.

In 2007, students at a Swedish Upper Secondary School engaged in a series of protests and demonstrations against the implementation of a written assessment of student conduct. This article explores the motivations and manifestations of this resistance, mainly by analysing debate articles and web material from the student union that organized the protests, but also by drawing on news articles, policy documents and interview material in order to grasp how this resistance was received by advocates of the conduct assessment. Making use of Mouffe’s and Rancière’s theories on political dissent, as well as Foucauldian power perspectives, the article discusses the students’ resistance in relation to political subjectification, concluding that it serves as an important manifestation of individual as well as collective engagement in school democracy, and personal student integrity.

Contemporary research shows that the methods and mechanisms of classical discipline still offer their services as regulators and indicators of educational progress. But is our conceptualization of discipline really adequate enough for handling the educational problems of today? This article makes urgent the need for a reconceptualization, using the immanence philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari together with the educational philosophy of Jacques Rancière. As a result, the article advances the concept of discipline as a circular segmentarity in contrast to the more linear power grid that we normally attribute to Foucauldian traditions. Strictly territorialized, but open-ended in terms of stratification, this segmentarity enables us to experience molecular levels of difference in life as well as in learning, while at the same time offering a hands-on experience of the equality of intelligence.