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The theme of this article is education as nation building in the Scandinavian countries: Denmark, Norway and Sweden. Starting with an overview of their Social Democrat parties' ascension of to near hegemony immediately following the Second World War, and these parties' impact on education, we go on to sketch the interplay between general political trends and educational policies up to the present day. We examine the goals of educational policies, the governance of the primary school system and the instruments of governance. Five levels of governance are taken into account: central government, regional and local government, schools and, finally, what happens in the classroom. Attention is given to trends that the Scandinavian countries shared in particular periods and to the divergence between them. We conclude that the main trend up to now is towards deregulation, decentralisation and individualisation. THE STRONG STATE IN THE HEYDAY OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACYThe inter-war years brought Labour or Social Democrat governments to power in all three Scandinavian countries. They established a political order that retained its hegemony from the 1930s until the early 1970s-with hindsight, a 'classic' Scandinavian type of governance. When the social democratic parties took over the reins of power, visions some of them had harboured about revolution, class struggle and collective ownership of the means of production vanished from view. Their mode of governance was based on a desire for economic growth, efficiency and social security, hence their deliberate attempts at reconciling conflicting interests between,