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Reclaiming Publicness of Education: Introduction

Maija Salokangas, Joe Oyler and Carl Anders Säfström

Reconnecting School and Society: Defending the School as a Public Institution

Gert Biesta
In this essay I reflect on the relationship between ‘school’ and ‘society.’ I do this from the angle of the idea of education as a public good, that is a ‘good’ that should serve ‘the public’ at large, and not just the private interests of some groups or individuals. While there are many countries in which the basic idea of education as a public good is accepted, there is a risk that the ‘right to education’ is exclusively understood in functional terms, where the school has to ‘give’ what society ‘asks’ of it. While this is a legitimate way in which the relationship between school and society can be understood and enacted, it is not the only way. In addition to the idea of the school as a function of and for society, I make a case that the school should also be understood as an institution, and that the task of institutions is to care and protect rather than to perform. It is only if there is a meaningful balance between the school as function and the school as institution, so I will argue, that the school can really be—and remain—a public good. I exemplify what this means by exploring the educational significance of the curriculum.

Education Is for the People, Not the State: Moving Beyond the Public/Private Distinction

Carl Anders Säfström
This text aims at shifting interest from public education to the publicness of education, and it does so by discussing the very foundations of education itself. In particular this article explores the difference between the Sophists’ practice-oriented understanding of education and its autotelic aims, on the one hand, and Plato’s understanding that education is a tool to perfect the state, on the other hand. I argue that the Sophist’s understanding of education is more productive for expanding the public meaning of education beyond the conventional understandings of the public as being tied to the state. This requires a shift from seeing the state as the only legitimate owner of the goals and aims of education for its people, to a publicness of education owned by the people themselves.

Who Answers the Call? Plural Selves, Internal Publicness, and Subjectifying Education

Joe Oyler
In this article, I take a critical stance against the individualist and essentialist conceptions of self embedded in educational policy and practice in the contemporary west and global north. These conceptions are both historically rooted in a colonial conception of “man” as rational and independent and are explanatorily narrow, failing to account for the relational and plural nature of lived subjectivity. To envision an alternative, I draw from the decolonial feminist phenomenology of Mariana Ortega and Maria Lugones and on Kathleen Wallace’s Cumulative Network Model—an account of selves as historically cumulative networks of “I” perspectives. I argue that reflexive dialogue among these perspectives exhibits an internal publicness that extends Biesta’s conception of becoming public beyond its social orientation. Drawing on Valsiner and Cabell’s catalysis metaphor and the practice of Philosophy for Children, I propose pedagogical mechanisms that support both external dialogue among students and internal dialogue within their network selves. Reclaiming the publicness of education, I conclude, requires cultivating publicness not only between persons but within them.

Holding the Tensions: Theorising Mediated Publicness in Curriculum-Making

Nika Maglaperidze and Maija Salokangas
This paper poses the question of under what conditions curriculum-making becomes public. The existing literature theorises curriculum-making’s publicness but in a way that leaves the concrete question as to how conditions and orientations for publicness converge unanswered. For instance, Hopmann and Westbury point to institutional underpinnings yet they still remain agnostic as to what orientates schools towards public rather than sectional purposes; Biesta, while recognising the tensions, doesn't provide an account of what institutional conditions would sustain it. In this paper, we propose the concept of mediated publicness: a precarious institutional mode of collective responsibility for basic education. The conditions for mediated publicness are made up of three components: withdrawal of resources from sectional circuits, structural responsibility grounded in intergenerational asymmetry, and professional mediation answerable to collective frameworks. Based on this account, publicness, following from Schleiermacherian dialectics, is shaped through antinomies that must be institutionally sustained rather than resolved. Finally, we draw on the Finnish case to show publicness emerging under a concrete conjuncture, and commodification dismantling it by collapsing said tensions rather than opposing publicness frontally.

The Fall and Rise of the Public in Public Education: From Hannah Arendt to Jürgen Habermas

F. Tony Carusi
What makes a public and what meaning do theories of the public hold for public education? This paper takes up the work of two philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, to argue that how the public is theorized is consequential for situating public education. The article begins with a brief overview of the U.S. federal education policy in terms of its neoliberalization of public education. I then consider Arendt’s theory of the public as a response to this policy discourse to argue that Arendt’s public results in the rise of the social at the expense of the public. I then highlight Habermas’s theory that maintains an opening for the public structured by its critical role. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of philosophy of education for continuing to conceptualize the public of public education.

Publicness in Education Through Alienation and Shared Experiences of Negativities

Dion Rüsselbaek Hansen
In this response paper, I begin by carefully engaging with the concerns raised during the symposium “Reclaiming the Publicness of Education” at the Nordic Education Research Association (NERA) conference held in Helsinki, Finland, in March 2025. I do so by highlighting key issues addressed by each of the contributing authors in relation to these concerns. Drawing inspiration from psychoanalytical theory (Lacan, 1997; McGowan, 2024) and political philosophy (Sloterdijk, 2016), I then reflect on how publicness—as a vital realm in education—can be conceptualized and embraced as central to what makes education educational. In this regard, I draw on notions of alienation, emancipation, and displacement. Importantly, I do not approach publicness as a shared realm in a positive, socio-symbolic sense within education. Rather, I argue for a conception of publicness as a space where subjects—understood as whatever-beings (singular subjects) without fixed determinations and beyond identities—can share their negativities (experiences of non-belonging, lack, and absence) in common. This, I contend, opens up possibilities for restructuring—and even a disruption—of the unequal socio-symbolic order that is typically foreclosed. This foreclosure, I posit, stems from, for example, the fixation of this order around dominant symbolic positions and identities, which tend to contaminate public realms with private interests in education.

The Idea of Meaning in Iddo Landau: Reflections on the Philosophy of Education

Javier Bermejo Fernández-Nieto
Iddo Landau's ideas on the meaning of life and their potential ramifications for modern education are examined in this article. This essay starts off by criticizing contemporary existential pessimism and arguing in favor of the notion that we can still find purpose in a flawed world. It explores the cultural, philosophical, and educational factors that have made this question especially relevant in recent years. Through dialogue with authors such as Metz, Seachris, Grondin, Gesché, Eagleton, Schinkel and others, a proposal is articulated that defends the pedagogical relevance of the debate on meaning, especially in contexts of axiological pluralism and crisis of references. The main argument here is that Landau's work not only revives the importance of meaning in philosophy but also offers essential insights for a teaching approach that, by focusing on meaning, can effectively tackle today's educational challenges. The work concludes with a reflection on the need for the educational sphere to reflect on the meaning of life from a critical, existential and pluralistic perspective.

I Came Into This With Nothing To Write About

David W. Jardine, Catalina Baeza Hidalgo, Ken Puley and David G. Smith
This is a collection of various solo and co-written bits and pieces all variously focusing old age and its lived-experiences, the arts of writing, the idea of "the whole" in the language of some writing on ecologically alert education, early childhood education, attention to particulars, encouraging students new to the fields of education and the teaching and learning that ensues, an old book read over 50 years ago (!) and ecological pedagogy.

Teachers and Philosophy: Essays on the Contact Zone, Edited by Cara E. Furman & Tomas de Rezende Rocha, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2025

Hastangka Hastangka
This review critically engages with Teachers and Philosophy: Essays on the Contact Zone, a multi-authored volume that explores the intellectual and pedagogical potential of philosopher-teacher collaborations through the lens of Mary Louise Pratt’s “contact zone.” The review situates the book within ongoing debates in philosophy of education, addressing its response to the decline of philosophical inquiry in teacher preparation and its challenge to the hierarchical separation between academic theorists and educational practitioners. Drawing on diverse methodological and conceptual traditions—including feminist, postcolonial, and dialogic pedagogies—the volume is shown to offer a pluralistic and justice-oriented vision for educational philosophy. Particular attention is given to the international relevance of the work, with chapters addressing Indigenous epistemologies, anti-racist curriculum, and collaborative inquiry across institutional and geopolitical boundaries. While the review acknowledges limitations in the book’s global reach and engagement with digital pedagogy, it concludes that the collection is a significant contribution to contemporary educational thought and a model for philosophizing in and through educational practice.

The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism, John Gray, London: Allen Lane, 2023

Matthew P. Trafford and Douglas D. Karrow

The Figure of the Teacher in Comics: A Psychoanalytic Study of Immaterial and Fragmented Education, David Lewkowich, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan Cham, 2024

Tesni Ellis