ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an introduction to the contributions in this book and presents its overarching ambition. The chapter starts from the observation that over the past decades neoliberal modes of governance have significantly undermined the public quality of education and have significantly eroded educational configurations that are orientated towards the public good. The rise of neoliberal modes of educational governance has been accompanied by a large number of critical studies in which the impact of marketisation and privatisation on education has been documented, analysed, and criticised. While such work is important, the ambition of this book is not so much to add further analysis and critique but rather to explore whether new forms of publicness may be emerging in educational settings and, if so, what this may hold for the future of public education. The contributions to this book thus seek to move beyond the critique of neoliberalism, not on the assumption that neoliberalism no longer plays a role in educational policy and practice but rather in order to explore new democratic possibilities for education. The chapter presents and discusses seven themes that are central to this exploration: new publicness and old publicness, customer satisfaction and the common good, the voice of the people and progressive populism, instrumentalisation and the integrity of education, the question of inclusion, the relationships between school and society, and the publicness of curriculum and pedagogy.
