«Læreraksjonen» i Norge 1942: Fra protest og paroler til kompromiss og konsensus : En analyse av «læreraksjonen» i lys av teorien om den nordiske modell for politisk kultur og Contentious politics («konfliktfull politikk») – med et vesteuropeisk komparativt blikk

Abstract

My Master thesis aims to discuss the conflicts that arose within the Norwegian school system in 1942, a time when the national socialistic party Nasjonal Samling (NS)attempted to nazify the Norwegian society through seizing control over educational establishments. In order for the indoctrination of Nazism among school children to succeed, Norwegian teachers were to be forcibly organized into the common organization, the Norwegian Teachers' Union (Norges Lærersamband). This was to ensure the party’s control over the teaching staff and the content of the education. In this thesis,I will seek to explain the conflicts that unfolded between the teaching staff and the NS regime as a result of the struggle for dominance in relation to children's education and upbringing. A conflict which later came to be referred to as «læreraksjonen» (the Teachers’ Protest). The protest sheds light on the tension between democracy and the rule of law on one hand, and the totalitarian ideology linked to a dictatorship on the other. The Teachers’ Protest is a well-known topic in Norwegian historiography and has been addressed by many. In the master's thesis, I will try to explain this form of civil resistance from new perspectives and explanatory methods that have received little attention in previous research. My analysis will be done both based on established research results and my own studies of some primary material. The research on the Teachers’ protest and civil resistance in the Norwegian context has to a small extent been elucidated on the basis of political culture and various strategies for forms of resistance and has been very empirically oriented in mapping incidents, actors and the conflict between the parties. Further, the analyzes of the Teachers' protest have often had a purely Norwegian interpretive framework without a look for similar actions in other countries in World War II.