In this chapter, I develop the concept of policy erasure to describe how ideas, practices, or values that used to be important in a vocation can become homeless in its knowledge and language. I am interested in how policy works not only by introducing new ideas, goals, or rationalities, but also by making existing ideas, purposes, or practices disposable. How does the forward march of organizations towards the new entail the relegation of certain concerns and practices to the past, to that which much be left behind to make room for the new? How do organizations make, sometimes violent, distinctions between what kind of values, people, and practices can feel at home and what kind are labelled as foreign and non- belonging. How do new strategies and policies relegate certain values, concerns, and practices to the past and deprive them of a place in language and knowledge?

Empirically, I present some of the main reform movements and policy initiatives that have changed Danish education over the last 35 years. I show how the introduction of new policies in this period worked to forget, delegitimize, or disavow purposes and concerns that had before been meaningful and intelligible. Attempting to cover 35 years of policy development in one chapter obviously means that there are initiatives, events, and nuances that are left out or given less attention than they perhaps deserve. The aim of the chapter is not to give an extensive representation, but to identify specifically the dynamics through which certain things are disavowed and disappear – in my vocabulary: how policy makes ghosts of certain pedagogical ideas, purposes, practices, and forms of knowledge that can no longer have an unproblematic existence in language and culture.