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This thesis examines the development of nomadic and Sámi school education between the 1950s and the 2010s and contributes new knowledge about educational goals, educational ambitions and partly also their implementation and principles for knowledge transfer. It has previously been shown that the educational policy objectives for Sámi education, from the 1962 school reform onwards, have been characterized by linguistic and cultural preservation considerations. In relation to that research, this thesis shows what these overall political decisions meant in a concrete sense, both in terms of knowledge content and more concrete goals with the education in the nomadic and Sámi schools. 

The thesis is based on curricula theory and examines the knowledge content and the concrete goals of Sámi education during the studied period. The educational ambitions, i.e., what was expressed in the curricula as the purpose and goal of education, have been studied based on Gert Biesta's theoretical framework on educational domains (qualification, socialization, and subjectification). The analysis on how collective Sámi identities have been portrayed in the curricula is based on theories of identification and imagined communities by Benedict Anderson and Thomas Hylland Eriksen. The methods used in the thesis are inspired by thematic analysis and content analysis.

The nomad and Sámi school, from the 1950s until the 2010s, has changed from an educational institution that aimed to provide students with a practical and theoretical education for a future life within a Sámi reindeer herding community, to a school form aimed at a broader Sámi community. A change that also meant that the teaching content was reduced to focusing primarily on the Sámi language. This can be seen as a consequence of the fact that the curricula, for the Sámi school form, were developed and adapted in relation to contemporary societal ideals and to educational policy efforts to create a uniform education from the 1950s onwards. This means that education for the Sámi has moved from a clearly separate educational mission to becoming more of a complement to the general primary school education.