Introduction

In 1970, the first official formulation regarding so-called foreign children appeared in a departmental circular of the Danish Ministry of Education. It stipulated that children residing in the country for more than six months were to be covered by the law of compulsory education (Cirkul?re 1970).

From the outset, these children were described with reference to their parents—or, more specifically, their parents’ relation to the labour market—and what was perceived as their special behaviour and mentality. The latter two were often described with a focus on ‘traditions’ (1970s) and religion (especially since the 1980s) in relation to an overall concept of culture, drawing on anthropological understandings, for example, but recontextualised and put at work in social practice and thereby transformed. Through such understandings, the parents—as representatives of this ‘cultural background’—became an object of schooling as well. They, too, became a part of the target for professional pedagogical strategies.

At the same time, people with a migration history did not merely become objects of schooling but reacted to schooling with different types of strategies, both individually and in organised collectives. Associations and councils of immigrants took part in pedagogical-political debates, for instance. An example of this is the G?stearbejdernes F?llesrad (Common Council for Guest Workers), which raised its voice publicly when in 1976 the Social Ministry issued a report on foreign workers without having included any representatives of this group in the process.

There were also actors with a migration history among the teachers and scholars in the milieus of the upcoming specialised pedagogic professionals that were formed from the 1970s. One example of such organisations emerging from these milieus is Landsforeningen for Undervisere af Fremmedsprogede Elever (LUFE; Association for Instructors of Foreign-Language Pupils), which, after several name changes, became Undervisere For tosprogede Elever (UFE: Instructors of Bilingual Pupils) in 1994.

Such name shifts mirror how the wording concerning the group of people in question has changed over time, as have the understandings. However, a socially applied and transformed concept of culture seems to be a persistent element over time, crossing groups of politico-pedagogical actors, although in different forms.

This chapter outlines the history of migrants in the field of Danish comprehensive schooling from the wake of the labour migration—especially from 1970 onwards—focusing on what understandings, concepts, and strategies towards children of labour migrants developed as the state and its professionals discovered them as an object of schooling. Such conceptualisations were created in and drew upon policy and debate concerning immigration to Denmark in general, just as pedagogical understandings became part of strategies, understandings, and debate in general.

I explore how politico-pedagogical actors—central and municipal school authorities, practicing and publishing teachers, professional associations, migrant associations, etc.—understood and developed pedagogical understandings and strategies that, on the one hand, saw the parents as a central problem and central explanation for their children’s behaviour at school and, on the other hand, regarded migrant parents as a resource that might diversify the curriculum and schooling.

Consequently, my main questions are the following: How have children with migrant parents been understood and described politico-pedagogically in the formative period from the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s? What role did descriptions of and attempts to involve the parents play in this regard? Which socially practised concepts emerged in connection to this part of the school population between the policy level and professional debate in this period, and how were these concepts transformed?

The exploration is based on source material consisting of documents related to state bureaucracy and the public and professional debate in the period: juridical and ministerial texts and reports, political and professional debates in newspapers, professional and academic journals, policy papers from civil and professional associations, handbooks for teachers, textbooks, etc. This exploration is undertaken to grasp the fluidity as well as persistence in the descriptive categories in light of the complex relations between political discourse related to state bureaucracy, public debate, and interest organisations, including the relations between these groups. In this sense, my choice of sources draws on the so-called entangled approaches to the social history of education, looking for linkages and relations rather than, for instance, fixed point transfers and strict diachrony, while simultaneously seeking to avoid the synchronic and ahistorical character of comparison in dominating approaches to comparative education studies, which has been subject to criticism (cf. Sobe 2013).

One of the chief points of this chapter is that what in the first part of the 1970s was seen as the culture of the children and their parents increasingly became connected to religion, especially Islam. In Western states today, including the Nordic ones, the Muslim part of the population is the object of much attention and problematisation. This chapter outlines some of the history behind this, focusing on the educational field in Denmark.

Muslimness, Migration, and the Field of Education From an International Perspective

Since the beginning of the 1990s, and thus the end of the Cold War era and the systemic competition between the Eastern and Western bloc, the focus on security has gradually shifted from communism and communist states to states characterised as ‘Muslim countries’ or, as Samuel Huntington phrases it in The Clash of Civilizations, ‘Islamic civilization’ (1996). While the foreign and security policy of the states in the former Western bloc has been focusing on the Middle East, for instance—and since the 9/11 attack on the US, on Afghanistan as well as on radical armed organisations—this process of ‘securitization’, as the political scientist Ole W?ver has conceptualised it, has also had an interior political site regarding the so-called Muslim populations of Western states (Buzan, W?ver, and de Wilde 1998; Sheikh and Crone 2012). Scholars from a wide range of disciplines1 have pointed to the ways in which citizens or individuals to whom what I in my previous research have conceptualised as ‘Muslimness’ is ascribed have been the object of increasing attention, ranging from (mainly negative) representation in the media to concrete policies, be they officially articulated or implemented in social practice (Buchardt 2008, 2014). The historian and sociologist of education Sherene Razack has in the Canadian context pointed to how ‘being a Muslim’ has increasingly become what she describes a racialised and culturalised category, one that has consequences for the individuals to whom it is ascribed, for example, in court cases and classroom practices (Razack 1998). In continuation, the anthropologist Shabana Mir has explored the space—and the lack of space—for US American women of Muslim affiliation to negotiate their identity in higher education (Mir 2014). These studies point to the relevance of studying the education system as a field where such understandings of Muslims are produced; the field of education is not merely a site for policy implementation but also a broader social practice that includes the production of meaning in relation to the securitisation policy directed towards the Muslim population in Western states.

Such scholarship also calls attention to how the question of ‘Muslims’ in the European states—or rather the question of the Muslimness ascribed to certain (groups of) people—is intertwined with the question of how to perceive and handle immigration since these states have a different history in this respect compared to Canada and the US—states that have been founded on the basis of immigration. Despite the differences in national policy towards migration in the late twentieth century between such states and the Nordic states, the histories of Denmark and Sweden also display significant differences when compared to each other.

In Sweden, a state multiculturalist strategy, comparable with the Canadian model, developed from the early 1960s, with what historian Mats Wickstrom define as white ethnic actors that successfully involved in policy development, more specifically activists from respectively the Jewish community and refugees from Eastern Bloc countries, e.g. the Baltics (Wickstrom 2013a; Chapter 6, this volume).

In Denmark, on the contrary, people with a migration history did not achieve a comparable degree of influence nor access to participate in policy development, and assimilation and integration can be said to have been the central policy tools (Vad Jonsson and Petersen 2010; Wickstrom 2013a, 2013b). Multiculturalism was never a successful strategy, a widespread understanding in policy, the social practice of state institutions, or the media, where public political debate about migrants began from the outset of labour migration in the late 1960s. However, I will argue that despite this, a focus on cultural difference—one that also forms part of multiculturalist policy and ideology—was part of the Danish state strategies towards migrants from the beginning of the 1970s. This took the form of using the concept of culture and cultural difference as a way to describe and handle migrants. One of the social fields where this has been significant is the field of education.

From the beginning of the 1970s when the Danish policymakers discovered the children of labour migrants—and the children of refugees soon after—this focus on culture became even more pronounced and continued to increase during the 1980s. In addition, the political interest in pupils with a migration history increasingly merged with a focus on the religion of the migrants in the form of Islam, an idea that became an explicit part of central legislation for comprehensive schooling in the early 1990s.

Studying the field of education historically shows that the moral panics concerning Islam in relation to migrants after the fall of the Berlin Wall (and even more so from the 2000s onwards) drew on preconditions from at least twenty years of political debate and policy developments concerning migrants and that the field of education was one of the very productive sites for this.