What if education were not a service to be consumed or a commodity to be purchased, but a shared world that we continually build and rebuild together? This is the proposition that frames the series. Rather than treating education as a private good or transactional service, I want to reclaim it as polis: a civic space where people appear to one another, speak and act in concert, and assume responsibility for a common world. This post sets the tone for what follows, clarifying why education should be understood in these public, imaginative, and ethical terms.

In earlier writing I have traced three threads that shape this argument. First, imaginaries: the background pictures of social life that make certain purposes and practices of education appear self-evident (Taylor, 2004). Second, the moral background: the often-unspoken ethical orders that orient what we think education is for and what counts as a legitimate outcome. Third, the public sphere: the realm in which education operates not only as individual advancement but as part of shared life. Here, I draw those strands together under one claim: education is best understood as polis, a site where collective imagination and responsibility can take form (Arendt, 2018).

Hannah Arendt’s work remains foundational. For her, the polis is not simply a physical city but a space of appearance, coming into being whenever people act and speak together (Arendt, 2018). Education is tied to what she called natality - the capacity for new beginnings that every child brings into the world. To educate is to welcome newcomers, introducing them to a shared inheritance while recognising their ability to transform it. Education, in this sense, is less about optimising outcomes than about holding open a world in which plurality, judgment, and initiative are possible (Arendt, 2018; Biesta, 2013).

Cornelius Castoriadis deepens this perspective by reminding us that society is not merely instituted but always instituting: it continuously creates and contests its own forms through the social imaginary (Castoriadis, 1997). Education is a key site of this instituting. It does not simply reproduce norms but also equips people to question and reimagine them. If education is reduced to a market relation, this instituting power is narrowed to private preference; if understood as polis, it becomes a horizon for negotiating the common good anew (Taylor, 2004; Castoriadis, 1997).

A polis-centred view also sharpens critique. When learners are positioned as customers, teachers as service providers, and platforms as neutral delivery tools, education risks losing its civic orientation. John Dewey warned that democracy depends on associations where shared problems are identified and addressed together (Dewey, 1916). Today’s digital infrastructures can either enable such shared work or erode it, depending on how they are imagined and governed. Gert Biesta’s call for the “beautiful risk” of education - to invite the unpredictable subject to appear - pushes us beyond a culture of measurement toward responsibility and response-ability (Biesta, 2013).

This series proceeds from that orientation. To reclaim education as polis is to ask how imaginaries shape institutions, how pedagogy and assessment might cultivate judgment rather than simply certify attainment, and how digital infrastructures might be designed and governed as commons rather than enclosed platforms. If education is indeed a shared world to be cared for, then our practices - and the infrastructures that sustain them - must be reimagined accordingly. The wager is simple but profound: education is not a commodity to be transacted, but a polis to be sustained. The question that follows is equally urgent: if we took this seriously, how might we remake our classrooms, our curricula, and our infrastructures together?

In earlier posts I developed three lines of argument that help to frame this series: imaginaries, the moral background, and the public sphere. Each offered a way of making visible the forces that quietly shape education, and each now helps to support the claim that education is best understood as polis.

On imaginaries, I argued that education is never shaped by policy alone but by the deep, shared pictures of social life that make some practices seem natural while rendering others implausible. Digital platforms, for instance, are never neutral scaffolding: they embody visions of learning that script what counts as participation, success, or care (Wheeler, 2025d). Drawing on Cornelius Castoriadis, I described institutions as condensations of meaning through which societies “institute” themselves; drawing on Charles Taylor, I emphasised how these meanings stabilise as social imaginaries that orient practice (Castoriadis, 1997; Taylor, 2004). What followed was a practical claim: educators are not passive recipients of such frames but moral agents capable of reinstituting them in new ways (Wheeler, 2025a).

The second thread concerned the moral background - the implicit ethical frameworks that authorise some practices as reasonable and legitimate. Here I argued that the background moral order of market society - merit, performativity, instrumentality - has seeped into pedagogical common sense. Dashboards and automated scoring present themselves as objective measures while smuggling in contested values (Wheeler, 2025c). Taylor helps us see these as lived, taken-for-granted understandings of the good; Abend, in his sociology of morality, uses the term “moral background” to capture how such frameworks emerge historically and silently shape what appears ethical (Taylor, 2004; Abend, 2014). This perspective exposes the contemporary fixation on measurement not as a neutral technical trend, but as a moral vision that narrows education to private responsibility and calculable outputs.

Finally, I re-engaged the public sphere - the arena where collective problems are debated in common - to argue that education must be understood as central to shared life, not simply private advancement. In analysing the digital university, I showed how platform governance recalibrates voice and visibility, shifting publicity from dialogic presence to managed exposure (Wheeler, 2025b; Wheeler, 2025e). Jürgen Habermas insists that legitimacy in modern societies depends on reason-giving in public; Nancy Fraser critiques this picture, warning that the singular “bourgeois” public obscures exclusions and the counterpublics that emerge in resistance (Habermas, 1992; Fraser, 1990). These insights resonate powerfully with platformed education: “being seen” through metrics is not the same as appearing to one another in a shared space of judgment, recognition, and care. If platforms determine who counts as a speaker and what counts as participation, then reclaiming education as polis requires designing and governing infrastructures as conditions for plurality rather than as engines of exposure.

Taken together, these strands set the stage for the present series. The claim that education is polis sharpens and extends what came before: imaginaries constitute institutions; moral backgrounds make those imaginaries feel obvious; and the public sphere is the site where these orders are tested, contested, and sometimes remade. The task now is to move from critique to construction - to ask how pedagogy, assessment, and infrastructure might be reinstituted so that education is not merely adjusted to the demands of market or platform, but reclaimed as a shared world in which newcomers can appear, speak, and act together.

For Hannah Arendt, the polis is not a geographical entity but a space of appearance - a worldly “in-between” that comes into being wherever people act and speak together. In this space, individuals reveal “who” they are rather than merely “what” they are, forging a shared reality through plurality and dialogue (Arendt, 2018). The polis is thus not guaranteed by territory or institutions alone; it exists whenever people take responsibility for appearing to one another in speech and action. For education, this is a vital reminder that its task is not simply the delivery of knowledge but the creation of conditions in which learners can appear as subjects, encounter others, and take part in shaping a common world.

Arendt links this understanding of the polis to her idea of natality: the human capacity for new beginnings that each generation brings. In her essay “The Crisis in Education,” she argues that adults bear a double responsibility. On the one hand, they must introduce newcomers to a shared inheritance, preserving the world as it is. On the other, they must safeguard the capacity of the young to initiate something new (Arendt, 2006). Education is therefore neither mere reproduction nor total innovation, but the stewardship of renewal - what Arendt elsewhere calls amor mundi, a love of the world enacted through the willingness to welcome and sustain new beginnings. This perspective frames education as a profoundly civic practice: it keeps the world open to plurality by continually introducing newcomers who can transform it.

In On Revolution, Arendt shows that such spaces of appearance require institutions capable of sustaining them. Councils, assemblies, and schools are not neutral containers but fragile achievements that can either preserve or undermine the conditions of plurality (Arendt, 2016). Education, then, is not only a matter of teaching content but of maintaining institutional forms where acting and speaking together remain possible. The polis is always precarious, dependent on how we design and uphold these shared spaces.

Today, questions of appearance and natality are inseparable from digital infrastructures. Arendt wrote in an era when the polis was imagined as physical co-presence, yet contemporary publics are mediated by platforms that both expand and constrain visibility. danah boyd describes these as networked publics - spaces characterised by persistence, searchability, scalability, and replicability (boyd, 2010). Zizi Papacharissi warns that digital media risk producing privatised or managed spheres rather than genuinely public ones (Papacharissi, 2010). José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal show how platforms now mediate core social functions, forcing us to ask how public values can survive within commercial architectures (van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, 2018). Shoshana Zuboff’s analysis of surveillance capitalism goes further, arguing that platforms often instrumentalise attention, converting acts of appearance into raw material for behavioural prediction (Zuboff, 2019).

Read through Arendt’s lens, these diagnoses reveal the stakes for education. Digital infrastructures can widen the space of appearance by supporting plurality, judgment, and initiative - or they can reduce it to managed exposure, where students are visible only as data points. If natality names the possibility of beginning anew, then education’s digital environments must be designed not to foreclose but to protect such beginnings. The challenge is architectural as much as pedagogical: to reclaim digital infrastructures as fragile public realms where newcomers can still appear, speak, and act together. If education is to remain a practice of renewal, we must resist reducing its polis to a marketplace of clicks and metrics.

Where Hannah Arendt highlights natality as the renewal of the world through each new generation, Cornelius Castoriadis complements this perspective with his idea of society as an institution of the imaginary. By this he means that societies are not simply given structures but ceaseless creations of meaning: social imaginary significations such as “progress,” “justice,” “citizenship,” or “the market” that orient collective life (Castoriadis, 1997). These significations are not reflections of underlying facts; they are the shared lenses through which societies make their world intelligible and livable.

Castoriadis insists that every society is marked by the tension between the instituted - the relatively stabilised norms, roles, and laws - and the instituting: the collective, creative capacity to question and remake those norms. The instituted gives durability and continuity; the instituting represents the always-present possibility of transformation (Castoriadis, 1997; Castoriadis, 1984). In this sense, society is never finished but always in the process of creating itself. To deny the instituting dimension is to fall into heteronomy - rule by forces experienced as external and unquestionable. To cultivate it is to advance the project of autonomy, in which people recognise themselves as the authors of their institutions and take responsibility for remaking them (Castoriadis, 1991).

Education is one of the primary sites where this instituting occurs. It is where societies transmit inherited significations - through language, law, knowledge, and ethos - and where newcomers are prepared to interrogate and transform them. For Castoriadis, paideia is not mere socialisation into a closed order but formation for autonomy: the cultivation of the ability to question inherited meanings and take part in collective self-institution (Castoriadis, 1991; Castoriadis, 1997). This double movement is visible in practice. A curriculum oriented toward employability embodies an imaginary of instrumentality, reproducing society as a labour market. By contrast, a pedagogy centred on dialogic judgment enacts an imaginary of citizenship, positioning students as participants in a shared world. In both cases, education is not neutral: it materialises particular imaginaries of the common good.

This becomes especially salient in the digital era. Educational technologies are not just tools for delivery; they actively instantiate imaginaries. Platform architectures embody visions of efficiency, optimisation, and prediction. Data dashboards, for example, privilege an imaginary in which learning is measurable, comparable, and governable. A Castoriadian lens pushes us to ask not only how these systems function, but what imaginary significations they carry and whether they expand or erode society’s instituting power (Castoriadis, 1997b; Adams, 2014). If education is where society introduces newcomers to a shared world and equips them to renew it, then the design of its institutions - including digital infrastructures - must be judged by whether they cultivate autonomy, plurality, and self-questioning, or whether they confine learning to the instituted logics of efficiency and control.

Education, in this sense, is not simply preparation for participation in existing systems. It is one of society’s most fragile and vital laboratories: the place where collective futures are imagined, contested, and enacted. If society is always instituting itself, then education is where that instituting becomes conscious - where we decide, together, what kind of common world we wish to imagine and bring into being.

The vision of education as polis - a shared world sustained through action, speech, and responsibility - stands in stark contrast to the neoliberal imaginary that has shaped policy and practice for the past four decades. Within this framing, education is reduced to a service to be purchased, a commodity to be traded, or a personal investment in human capital. Gary Becker’s work established the influential model: education is valuable insofar as it enhances productivity and individual earnings (Becker, 1993). Building on this logic, Stephen Ball shows how new policy networks position education within global markets, where institutions compete for customers and credentials are treated as positional goods (Ball, 2012). Wendy Brown demonstrates that this neoliberal reasoning does not merely restructure policy but remakes subjects themselves, rendering students as entrepreneurs of their own human capital, measuring worth by return on investment (Brown, 2015).

These economic imaginaries increasingly find their technological counterpart in the logics of platforms. As Ben Williamson argues, platform architectures embed neoliberal assumptions into educational practice: personalisation becomes product differentiation, engagement is defined through measurable clicks, and optimisation is promised via predictive analytics (Williamson, 2017). José van Dijck, Thomas Poell and Martijn de Waal show how platforms now mediate core social functions, translating public institutions into connective services governed by commercial priorities (van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, 2018). For Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, this represents a new form of data colonialism: human life itself is appropriated as raw material for capitalism (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). Neoliberal economics and platform logics converge in the dashboard, the ranking, and the score - interfaces where learning is reimagined as quantifiable performance.

Metrics-driven policy consolidates this commodified vision. Theodore Porter describes how quantification creates an aura of neutrality, while Wendy Espeland and Mitchell Stevens show how commensuration - the process of turning unlike qualities into comparable numbers - renders heterogeneous practices governable through indicators and rankings (Porter, 1995; Espeland and Stevens, 1998). These metrics do not simply record reality; they reshape it. Once established, they are fed back into institutional practice through audits, targets, and incentives, creating what Cris Shore and Susan Wright call “audit culture” (Shore and Wright, 2015). David Beer has described this circulation of data as metric power, a regime in which numbers come to govern attention and action (Beer, 2016). As Neil Selwyn notes, educational technologies rarely arrive politically neutral: they often carry assumptions that align neatly with neoliberal priorities, embedding them in the everyday life of classrooms and campuses (Selwyn, 2014).

What is lost when education is treated as a market transaction rather than a shared world? First, plurality: competition and private preference are privileged over judgment in common. Second, public responsibility: when success is framed as individual ROI, collective questions of equity and care are sidelined. Third, renewal: metrics and platform incentives stabilise the present, dampening the capacity for beginning anew that education should protect. And fourth, trust and intrinsic value: when all goods must be quantified, the intrinsic worth of inquiry, curiosity, and civic learning is diminished, and trust between educators and students is eroded.

The question, then, is not whether platforms or metrics are inherently corrosive, but what imaginaries they instantiate. Metrics could be used as tools rather than masters; platforms could be governed to sustain public values rather than extract private ones. But this requires refusing the reduction of education to service delivery and insisting on its status as polis. If education is understood only as commodity, it risks hollowing out the very public realm in which democratic life takes root. To reclaim education as a shared world is to resist its enclosure within the market and to reopen it as a fragile space of appearance, judgment, and renewal.

If education is polis - a shared world sustained by action and speech - then pedagogy must be understood as a civic practice. Teaching is not simply the transmission of content but the creation of spaces of appearance where learners can encounter one another, deliberate, and assume responsibility for the common world (Arendt, 2018; Dewey, 1916; Biesta, 2013). John Dewey described democracy as a way of life, made possible when shared problems are named and addressed together; Gert Biesta insists that education involves a “beautiful risk” in which subjects appear unpredictably, not reducible to outcomes (Biesta, 2013). Pedagogy, from this perspective, protects a worldly “in-between” where plurality and initiative can flourish. To teach is to craft civic spaces of co-action.

Assessment follows the same logic. In a market imaginary, assessment is a sorting device: summative tests and standardised metrics certify attainment, aligning education with comparability and competition. But if education is polis, assessment should be understood as a practice of shared judgment and responsibility. D. Royce Sadler’s classic work makes clear that formative assessment depends on students engaging with criteria, understanding standards, and recognising the gap between present and desired performance (Sadler, 1989). Nicol and Macfarlane-Dick (2006) extend this, showing how feedback can cultivate self-regulation: the ability to generate one’s own judgments rather than simply absorb grades. Building on these insights, Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall and Wiliam (2003) demonstrate how assessment for learning can be embedded in classroom practice through questioning, feedback, and peer assessment, enabling students to engage authentically with criteria and standards. In this frame, assessment is civic technology: learners participate in evaluating quality together, rather than being reduced to datapoints in a ranking system. This contrast makes visible what is at stake. Summative regimes align with neoliberal metrics; formative, educative practices cultivate the dispositions necessary for collective life.

Digital infrastructures likewise reveal the tension between enclosure and polis. At present, educational platforms often operate as proprietary silos, enclosing content, data, and interaction within vendor logics of optimisation and extraction (Williamson, 2017; van Dijck, Poell and de Waal, 2018). Such infrastructures instantiate neoliberal imaginaries in code: efficiency as the overriding good, learners modelled as consumers, and institutions positioned as clients. But infrastructures can also be re-imagined as commons: shared resources governed collectively rather than privately owned (Hess and Ostrom, 2007). The commons perspective - articulated by Elinor Ostrom (2015) and extended in the domain of knowledge and digital resources (Benkler, 2006; Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg, 2014) - asks practical questions: who participates in rule-making, how stewardship is resourced, how access is assured, and how accountability is maintained. Designing infrastructures as commons means resisting enclosure and instead creating conditions for plurality, debate, and shared responsibility. It does not imply rejecting metrics or platforms, but subjecting them to public purposes and making them contestable.

These strands hang together under the claim that education is polis. Civic pedagogy fosters spaces of appearance; educative assessment cultivates responsibility and shared judgment; commons-oriented infrastructures resist enclosure. Each resists the reduction of learning to service delivery. And each requires institutional courage: to protect time for deliberation, to value judgment over speed, and to design digital systems as shared worlds rather than private pipelines. The choice is stark: will education be governed as a market utility, or reclaimed as a fragile public realm where newcomers can appear, speak, and act together? Reclaiming education as polis is not a metaphor - it is a program of design and responsibility.

This series is not an exercise in nostalgia but an invitation to imaginative reclamation. If education is polis - a shared world sustained in action and speech - then our task is to re-institute practices and infrastructures that make such a world possible. Each post builds on the last, moving from diagnosis to design, drawing on Arendt’s ideas of plurality and natality, Castoriadis’s account of society as self-instituting, Taylor’s work on social imaginaries and moral frameworks, Dewey’s pragmatism, and contemporary commons scholarship. The arc unfolds deliberately: from imaginaries of the common good, through autonomy and institutions, to plurality and, finally, a manifesto for renewal.

This opening post has argued that education is best understood not as a commodity or service but as polis: a fragile, shared world sustained whenever people appear to one another in speech and action. Hannah Arendt’s vision of the space of appearance reminds us that plurality and natality - the arrival of new beginnings through each generation - are central to education’s promise (Arendt, 2018; Arendt, 2006). Cornelius Castoriadis adds that societies are never fixed but always in the process of self-institution, capable of questioning and remaking their shared meanings (Castoriadis, 1997). Seen in this light, education is not exhausted by credentials or productivity. Its deepest vocation is civic: to renew a common world in which we can live, deliberate, and act together.

To hold to this vision requires rethinking our assumptions in the age of automation and platforms. Platform logics encourage us to see students as data points, teachers as service providers, and learning as a process to be optimised. Metrics promise neutrality, but as Theodore Porter and others have shown, they commensurate unlike things, narrowing attention to what can be quantified (Porter, 1995; Espeland and Stevens, 1998). When imported uncritically into education, such logics risk hollowing out plurality, renewal, and judgment. Yet critique is not enough. As John Dewey (1916) argued, democracy is a way of life sustained by shared problem-solving; as Gert Biesta (2013) insists, education entails a “beautiful risk” of allowing subjects to appear unpredictably, not reducing them to outputs. Nancy Fraser (1990) reminds us that the public sphere is always contested, demanding vigilance; Elinor Ostrom (2015) shows that commons endure only when they are actively governed. Taken together, these insights offer a constructive path: education can be reclaimed as a public realm if we have the imagination and courage to design for plurality, responsibility, and renewal.

The posts that follow develop this inquiry step by step. We will begin by examining the imaginaries of the common good - the often-unspoken pictures that shape what we think education is for - and contrast marketised logics of competition with democratic visions of participation and care. From there, we will revisit autonomy, moving beyond the solitary, self-optimising learner toward a richer account of agency as relational and collective. The third step considers institutions and infrastructures, showing how platforms and protocols act as instituting forces that must be reclaimed for public values. The fourth focuses on plurality and natality, developing Arendt’s insight that education sustains the possibility of difference and new beginnings. The series culminates in a manifesto for reclaiming education as a democratic institution of the common good, offering principles for pedagogy, assessment, and infrastructure.

This series is not nostalgic. It does not call us back to a golden age, nor does it suggest abandoning technologies or metrics altogether. Instead, it invites us to take responsibility for how education is imagined, enacted, and governed. Pedagogies can be designed as civic spaces; assessments can foster shared judgment rather than ranking; digital infrastructures can be governed as commons rather than enclosed as utilities. Each is a choice - and together they amount to a political project of reinstituting education as polis.

So let me end with a question that is both philosophical and practical, one that cannot be answered alone: how can we, as educators, students, and citizens, imagine education otherwise - together?

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