ABSTRACT
In this chapter I ask whether the future for public education and for a new ‘publicness’ of education after the critique of all the neoliberal agendas that try to steer public education in very particular directions lies in finding the right agenda for the school and in defending and pursuing such an agenda vigorously. I raise the question of whether it might be the case that the very idea that education needs an agenda is actually what has allowed for the erosion of public education to occur because agenda-setting always raises the question of who has the right to ‘own’ the agenda for education. Rather, therefore, than assuming that the most urgent question to consider is what ‘we’ may want from ‘the school,’ there is at least also the question of what the school may want from us. There is, in other words, at least also the question of what the insistence of education itself is. And rather, therefore, than assuming that the only legitimate question to consider is what kind of school society we may need or want, there is at least also the question of what kind of society the school actually needs in order to be school and not just an instrument for realising particular agendas. The issue at stake, therefore, is that of the emancipation of the school itself, and it is here that we may find an opening towards a new publicness of education.
