COMPARATIVE DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF EDUCATIONAL TEXTS

The article studies ideologies dominant at the macro level in society by means of discourses present in educational texts at the micro level. Education policy discourses in major Estonian, Slovenian and Finnish educational texts are compared both in curricula and education legislation, in order to understand their role in the socio-political context in reproducing and legitimising the leading ideology. The article seeks to find out to what relative extent the social democratic, liberal and conservative discourses are represented, what kind of similarities and differences as well as changes can be detected in different societies, and how discourses have changed over time. The results are compared to those reached by various analyses of educational discourses. The most powerfully represented discourse in educational texts of the three countries is the conservative one, followed by the liberal and the social democratic discourse in that order, the latter being the least represented, especially in Estonia. The conservative discourse is on the increase in Estonian and Finnish educational texts. From a time perspective, the liberal discourse in educational texts is weakening and the conservative one is becoming stronger. The result coincides with the opinion expressed by social scientists and authors of critical discourse analysis, according to which the rise of neoliberal ideology in the 1980s, coming to replace social democratic ideology, has contributed to an increase in conservative values.