In Denmark, Norway and Sweden, teacher education has been subject to comprehensive reforms over the past few years. Central governmental documents are forming the basis for these reforms, and in the documents concerning Norway and Sweden, the task of training pupils’ skills in critical thinking are emphasized as an overall aim for teaching processes and education.

We will address the question of how the policy documents in Norway and Sweden give the necessary preconditions for developing skills in critical thinking in schools.  This question will be discussed comparatively, based on the analysis of policy documents and official reports on observations from the outcome of the aforementioned reforms, in Norway and Sweden. The theoretical and methodological basis for this study will be critical discourse analysis (CDA), developed by Norman Fairclough (1995) and Ruth Wodak, among others. This will, in turn, raise questions such: What kind of differences can be highlighted between Norway and Sweden? Can possible differences be related to differences in political climate? If not, what can they be related to? How do texts communicate to readers, and why do they communicate the way they do?

From a critical discourse analysis perspective, a text can be described, analyzed and interpreted on three levels; a descriptive linguistic level, a discourse level and a societal level (Fairclough, 1995 p. 133). The data being examined and analyzed are the two policy documents: “Teacher: Role and Educational” (Norway) and “A Sustainable Teacher Education” (Sweden). A qualitative content analysis consists of a close reading of the documents, focusing on the respective country’s ambitions for teacher education. Preliminary our analyzing shows that a specific definition of the term “critical thinking” seems to be lacking in the documents from both countries.