A Strategy for Culturally Respectful Rebellion in the Educational Sector in Greenland – or: How to put the Right Questions!

Various sociological models of what education do how it works and the problems involved explain why it constitutes a battleground for potential social and political conflict. How education is measured or evaluated is equally conflict material. In the present article, traditional concepts and measures of education are applied in a somewhat atypical context: Greenland. Here, the government launched an ambitious education reform in 2005 aimed at increasing both the level and quality of education. The results of the evaluations have been ‘disappointing’ thus far – the reform has failed. Which battles are introduced when ways of looking at education in contemporary high-tech European societies are used in the nature-dependent Inuit context? What may change the picture? In the present article the question is answered using Robert Merton’s theory of deviance resting on cultural goas and institutional means.