Greek, Finnish and Danish curricula and their relation to the labor market: a critical approach

The present paper is a comparative examination of three European Commission (EC) countries' primary and elementary education curricula with the European Commission's Communication and its consequences for curriculum skills relating to children's lives as adults and workers. It is a documentary analysis of secondary sources of the texts of the curricula. It emphasizes on the aims and objectives concerning skills required to be cultivated in students through the education curricula of European countries of Greece, Finland, and Denmark, as economically developed countries according to the World Bank (2019). According to the European Commission's Communication "Rethinking Education: investing in skills for better socio-economic outcomes" (2012a), the European Commission's Communication "New Skills Agenda for Europe: Working together to strengthen human capital, employability and competitiveness" (2016) and the European Commission's Communication "Digital Education Action Plan 20212027 Resetting education and training for the digital age" (2020), they are compared with the curricula in terms of skills required for the labor market. The method that was used was the qualitative content analysis in the texts of the curricula based on the required skills. The results show that the texts of the curricula from Greece, Finland, and Denmark have common references with the aforementioned above European Commission's Communications. Regarding the content of the curricula, it is observed that the goals and aspirations are linked to the development of the personality and the cultivation of skills related to employability. The goal of the curricula is to cultivate skills in students that will be necessary for the children's lives as adults and workers. In the conclusions, it is stated that there is the intention and purpose of developing and cultivating skills based on the requirements of the labor market and the instrumentalization of these skills for the benefit of the economic framework not only for the researched countries but also on a wider scale.