Reclaiming Publicness of Education: Introduction

In March 2025, a group of colleagues proposed a symposium concerned with the question of how publicness of education could be reclaimed. That symposium was held at the Nordic Education Research Association (NERA) conference at the University of Helsinki. The symposium continued a series of formal and informal conversations and intellectual work carried out by the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy at Maynooth University starting in 2017. The symposium included four original contributions and two discussion papers drawing on education systems as varied as Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, and the United States. With good intentions we named the symposium “Reclaiming Publicness of Education.” The academic community continues to raise concerns about how public education, in various, even seemingly democratic contexts, around the world, is under threat from the corrosive effects of neoliberal education policy and resulting intensified marketisation, commercialisation, and commodification. Furthermore, the rise of populist and authoritarian voices and agendas poses direct threats to democracy, publicness, and education. For the Centre for Public Education and Pedagogy, publicness is not to be understood as a steady state of affairs, but rather a quality of togetherness that requires appropriate conditions and constant care to survive and thrive, like a sensitive plant. To stay with the analogy, publicness can wither down slowly, or collapse overnight, depending on the nature of hostile forces imposed upon it. Achieving conditions in which publicness can thrive can be demanding, as Rüsselbaek Hansen argues in this issue, as it requires listening and genuine engagement with dissident voices, and sitting with the discomfort such engagement brings. Discomfort then serves as the very soil of publicness. The intention to reclaim something indicates a desire to bring or to take something back. Hence, in order to reclaim the publicness of education, a past version which could be reclaimed should have existed. In our efforts to reclaim, we were conscious to steer clear of empty sentimentalism and nostalgia: the pitfalls of making things great again. Additionally, we recognise that a special issue needs to do something more than simply name threats to publicness and describe its downfall, which extant literature already succeeds at. Instead, we wanted to shine light on the places and potentialities where publicness might thrive. This special issue mimics the original symposium with contributions from symposium presenters Gert Biesta, Carl Anders Säfström, Joe Oyler, Nikoloz Maglaperidze, and Maija Salokangas. An additional contribution by Tony Carusi is included in this special issue and Dion Rüsselbaek Hansen offers a discussion on the topic. In his essay, Biesta argues convincingly for a meaningful balance between the school as a function and the school as an institution in order for the school to be—and remain—a public good. This is particularly pertinent in our time, where functional understanding of the school has become increasingly hegemonic. Biesta suggests that only in a school institution that takes seriously its task to care and protect, rather than perform, it is possible for the new generation to exist as subjects of their own life. In “Education Is for the People, Not the State: Moving Beyond the Public/Private Distinction,” Säfström gives some examples that, together, make the common distinction between public and private education somewhat problematic and suggest that we instead focus on and ask questions that move us beyond public versus private education, two sides of the same coin. Instead of public education, Säfström explores what the shift to publicness of education implies and traces its line of thought to the Sophists understanding of education and democracy. Seeking to shine a light in a place where publicness is seldom sought, Oyler argues for an …