A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school - conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk

Conceptual analysis of disagreements among students at Norway’s Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO), opened in 1967, where conflicts about the meaning and purpose of education nearly fractured the school. The students’ divergent ideological positions were expressed in a four-and-a-half-hour “Soul-Searching Assembly” recorded and later published. The article examines dialogues for underlying values and how such paradigms shape judgments of what is good, ethical, just, true, and rights-relevant in education and human life.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages28

Reading Time1 h 11 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Alienation and the creation of EGO

ISSN: 2325-3290 (online) A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school: A conceptual analysis of a soul-searching assembly meeting Ana Marjanovic-Shane Independent Scholar, USA Abstract In this article, I attempt to conceptually analyze points of disagreement among the students of the first democratic highschool in Norway, The Experimental Gymnasium of Oslo (EGO). The clashes and disagreements among the students started heating up immediately after the school was opened in the fall of 1967. As they were learning how to run their school, the students discovered profound differences in their views of education and its purposes. Their deep disagreements about the meaning of education and conflicts about their school practices almost broke up their school right at the very start of its existence. Their different understandings of education erupted in a passionate and dramatic general assembly meeting, which they later referred to as the Soul-Searching Assembly1. This four-and-a-half hour-long meeting was recorded and its transcript was published (Hem & Remlov, 1969).2 In this article, I analyze the dialogues from the assembly, looking for the students’ diverse ideological and conceptual positions, views, desires, and underlying values. The tensions and clashes the students voiced echo the profound paradigmatic differences in conceptualizing education throughout the modern history of education, from the Enlightenment until now, a few decades into the 21st century. The purpose of my analysis is to examine these paradigmatically different views and the concerns behind them. These radically different paradigmatic, conceptual, and axiological positions have an effect on what we may consider being good, ethical, just, and true for human existence, human relationships, and human rights in general, and especially in education. The EGO students ’ intensive and urgent ontological need to explain their very different positions to eachother allowed me to take a closer look into the tensions and conflicts still existing in the larger cultural-historical public sphere of discourse on education. Ana Marjanovic-Shane is an Independent Scholar interested in ethical ontological dialogism and meaningmaking in education, democratic education, students’ academic freedoms, and students’ critical and creative authorship in self-education. Her articles in English and Serbian were published in various journals (e.g. , Mind, Culture, Activity Journal, Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, Dialogic Pedagogy Journal) and as book chapters in books on play and education. Two recent publications include: Shugurova, O. , Matusov, E. , & Marjanovic-Shane, A. (2022) . The University of Students: A place for joint self-education. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal, 10 , E1-E42; Marjanovic-Shane, A. , Meacham, S. , Choi, H. J. , Lopez, S. , & Matusov, E. (2019) . Idea-dying in critical ontological pedagogical dialogue. 1 Read more in depth about this meeting in two other articles in this Special issue, Marjanovic-Shane (2023a, 2023b) . 2 Dialogic Pedagogy: An International Online Journal was given a gracious permission to publish extensive parts of this transcript, which is a part of the book by Hem & Remlov, “Forsøksgymnas i praksis” [Experimental Gymnasium in Praxis], by the current owner of the estate of Pax Publishing house. Dialogic Pedagogy: An International DOI: 10.5195/dpj.2023.445 | Vol. 1 Online 1 No. 2 Journal | [http://dpj.pitt.edu](http://dpj.pitt.edu)[ ](http://dpj.pitt.edu)(2023) A217 A paradigmatic dialogue-disagreement in a democratic school Ana Marjanovic-Shane Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 20, 68-79, and a book: Matusov, E. , A. Marjanovic-Shane & M. Gradovski, (2019) . Dialogic pedagogy and polyphonic research art: Bakhtin by and for educators , Palgrave Macmillan. Ana lives and works in the USA. Acknowledgment I want to thank my colleague Eugene Matusov for many

FAQs

What event does the article analyze to study student disagreements at EGO?

The article analyzes dialogues from a four-and-a-half-hour general assembly meeting later referred to as the “Soul-Searching Assembly.” It focuses on how students articulated diverse ideological and conceptual positions during that meeting.

Why did EGO students create a school for themselves in Oslo in 1966?

They were motivated by alienation in education and a perceived loss of dignity, seeking equal rights in decision-making. Their critique targeted alienated learning in Norwegian conventional schools.

What is the article’s purpose in examining these disagreements?

The analysis aims to examine paradigmatically different views of education and the concerns behind them, and to clarify how these positions affect ideas of what is good, ethical, just, and true for human existence and education.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by hdkawk