This paper addresses the value of teacher-student relations within schooling. More specifically we aim to explore the occasional possibility of an open-ended negotiated curriculum. Our point of departure is a critical stance towards the discursive shift that is taking place within the Swedish as well as other countries school systems. The new discourse of learning is influenced by the market ideology of neo-liberalism and its contemporary management vocabulary. A new formalism of this kind reduces teaching to an instrumental act based on predefined content far from the complex interactions within the dynamics of teacher-student relations. In the findings from two different interview studies, one with teachers and the other with students, certain spaces where education can take place emerge in negotiation between teacher and student. How can we understand these spaces and what consequences do the increasing inspection and control, accountability, measurability and order have for the possibility of such spaces in school?