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English Summary
This thesis is a study of health cultures in the Danish Primary School during a 30-year period. It
examines how the concept of health summarizes a series of meanings implying culture specific
understandings of body, individual, and the organization of society. It is not a story of evolution,
systematically approaching the truth about health or its pedagogical organization. Instead it is a
cultural analytical investigation of the different ways we give health meaning during time using The
Danish Primary School as case.
The thesis pursues three primary interests. First an interest in the ways the concept of
health comes into use, thus the relations between language and culture. Second, an interest in how
we can analyze health cultures and third an interest in a concrete empirical field, that is health
cultures in the Danish Primary School.
The investigation focuses on conceptions of health in pedagogical texts, especially
teaching materials, since 1975. At this time the perspective on health began to change. First, the
political focus on health and health enlightenment expanded because of an increase in costs and
activities in the Danish health care system. On this background words as „health pedagogy‟ and
„health promotion‟ became dominant in the discussion of health and its pedagogical organization.
Second, the Danish curriculum for the primary school became democratized implying new
arguments for health education. In other words humanistic elements were assimilated in the
schools‟ concepts of health. This thesis sets out to examine how this humanistic turn is interpreted
and forms new health cultures at school in the years that followed.
The result of the investigations presents four different ideal types of health cultures:
health as a hygienic culture, health as consumer culture, health as a culture of self-realization and
health as a culture of mobilization. The ideal types function as (1) cultural historical observations of
the concept of health in an educational context, (2) a contrast to and challenge of the concepts of
health we meet today, and (3) an analytical tool for analyzing health cultures more generally.
Theory and method
The thesis is especially directed at teaching resources developed for health education in the Danish
Primary School, thus putting forward the claim that teaching materials provide a useful approach
for investigating different health cultures. By using this as the point of departure the study
approaches the theme by analyzing language. Thus, the concept of culture is about shared
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