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This paper explores the declining trend of fine arts education in secondary schools. We examine mechanisms that may explain this phenomenon on structural levels of policymaking and policy implementation in different areas of the education system. What will be defined as the "selection device" refers to the structurally determined selection of educational content at various policy levels of society. We argue that the choices politicians, principals, students, and parents make are regulated by "nudging" as an underlying principle of the selective device. By presenting students with "rational choice" alternatives, they are gently pressuring them away from selecting arts courses. This redirection is discursively conveyed by schools, but systematically governed by national and international guidelines in which the fine arts have a relatively low status. The declining legitimacy of arts subjects in secondary education can thus be seen as an outcome of policies embedded in the education system. By manipulating the features of the selection device, the transnational movement of the New Right exerts control over educational policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a result of international neoliberal and neoconservative trends, the status of the arts has been devalued in secondary school curricula. This paper examines why the arts are not considered core educational knowledge in pedagogic discourse arising from the New Right policy agenda. In a case study analysis of Swedish educational policy debates, curriculum codes and their underlying principles of recontextualization are weighed as they bear on the arts. Discursive positionings and socio-political networking between political standpoints and stakeholders have been analysed based on official Swedish documents associated with the legislative process of curriculum revision. Our findings show how justifications of arts education clash with coding orientations arising from a strong classification between what is presumed to be valuable and non-valuable knowledge, which in turn is due to an underlying principle of visibility. While advocates argue that artistic practices promote transversal competences and have intangible benefits, this same argument unwittingly strengthens the non-autonomous status of the arts. The illegitimacy of the arts also stems from the belief that they are only marginally related to visible market values. Taken together, the arts are not considered core knowledge because of their perceived relative unimportance for higher academic learning or vocational competence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]