Education is not simply a matter of transmitting knowledge or certifying competence; it is a social project that asks what kind of people, institutions, and world we are trying to make together. To reclaim education as polis is to insist that classrooms, curricula, and governance structures are part of a shared public life oriented toward judgment, plurality, and responsibility rather than only private gain or institutional throughput. The starting point for such a reclamation is not a new policy instrument but a shift in the underlying pictures that orient our practices: our social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004).

By imaginaries I follow Charles Taylor’s usage: the deep, often unarticulated understandings through which people “imagine” their social existence, what matters, how we fit together, and what counts as legitimate action (Taylor, 2004). Imaginaries are never neutral. They carry implicit ideas of the good, shaping how individuals and institutions evaluate choices. Taylor’s related notion of strong evaluation underscores this point: human beings are not passive choosers of preferences but evaluators who weigh goods against one another (Taylor, 1989). In education, what we measure, reward, and narrate as success already expresses a moral horizon. For example, in a market imaginary, students appear as consumers and success as credential accumulation; in a democratic imaginary, students appear as citizens-in-formation and success as collective flourishing.

Over recent decades, however, a marketised imaginary has colonised education. Neoliberal rationality reframes learners as human capital, institutions as firms, and public purposes as performance indicators (Brown, 2015). Improvement is measured through competition, benchmarking, and audit, reinforced by a culture of testing, rankings, and dashboards. Within this frame, the “common good” is reduced to aggregated outcomes such as graduate earnings or institutional market share. The question of what education is for risks disappearing behind the question of how much can be counted (Biesta, 2010).

A democratic imaginary offers a different starting point. For John Dewey, democracy is more than a political structure: it is a way of life sustained by habits of inquiry, communication, and shared problem-solving (Dewey, 1916). Education is central to cultivating these habits, making it a social rather than merely private good. Cornelius Castoriadis complements this vision by emphasising that societies are not fixed orders but continually self-instituting through shared meanings. Autonomy, in his terms, is not only individual independence but the collective capacity to question and remake these meanings (Castoriadis, 1997). Taken together, Dewey and Castoriadis suggest that education should not be confined to skill production for markets; it must also be a site where people learn to participate in shaping the institutions that shape them.

This post takes these contrasts as a practical invitation. Reclaiming education as polis means re-anchoring practice in a renewed imaginary of the common good: one that treats plurality as a resource, participation as a norm, and care as an institutional obligation. Measurement has its place, but it should answer rather than substitute for the question of purpose. Curricula, assessment, and governance must therefore be reimagined as contributions to democratic renewal. This post thus sets the stage for the broader series question: how might reclaiming education as polis depend on renewing the imaginaries of the common good?

Charles Taylor’s idea of strong evaluation helps us see why education is always about values, not just neutral techniques. In Sources of the Self, Taylor distinguishes between weak evaluations, choosing among preferences, and strong evaluations, where we weigh and rank goods as higher or lower, more or less worthy (Taylor, 1989). Education is filled with such judgements: deciding what counts as success, which capabilities to cultivate, or how to assess achievement always involves ranking some goods above others. We are not merely choosing between options; we are orienting practice by reference to what we think constitutes a worthwhile education.

This recognition exposes the moral frameworks behind everyday decisions. Choices about curriculum aims, whether to emphasise critical inquiry, civic participation, or employability, are not matters of efficiency alone but reflections of values. Pedagogical norms such as collaboration versus competition also depend on judgements about what kind of learners, and citizens, we wish to form. Even governance mechanisms, whether focused on accountability through high-stakes testing or formative feedback, rest on strong evaluations of what matters most. Taylor’s point is that education cannot be reduced to technocratic preference satisfaction; it always involves appeals to goods we take to be constitutive of human flourishing (Taylor, 1989).

Taylor’s later work on social imaginaries shows how these evaluations are socially patterned. Imaginaries are the deep background understandings through which societies “imagine” their collective life: what matters, how we fit together, and what legitimate action looks like (Taylor, 2004). They make certain goods appear natural and others invisible. In education policy, a market imaginary foregrounds goods such as competitiveness, efficiency, and positional advantage. This makes tools like league tables, standardised tests, and performance dashboards seem obvious. By contrast, a democratic imaginary foregrounds participation, communicative inquiry, and care, which highlights the value of deliberative pedagogy, community partnerships, or formative assessment. We never select policies in a vacuum; imaginaries silently organise which goods are foregrounded and which recede.

Real-world examples show this dynamic clearly. International tests such as PISA exemplify how a market imaginary elevates measurable outcomes as the dominant good, while community-based learning initiatives or democratic school experiments reflect a democratic imaginary that prizes shared inquiry and collective responsibility. The imaginary does not determine every detail, but it frames what feels legitimate and valuable.

This analysis links directly back to the previous post, Education as Polis – Reclaiming the Public Dimension of Learning, and its emphasis on moral orders and evaluative horizons. Taylor’s account of the modern moral order demonstrates how institutions stabilise particular conceptions of the good, often without explicitly naming them (Taylor, 2004). In education this means that productivity and individual advancement often become default benchmarks, while goods like public responsibility or democratic deliberation recede. To reclaim education as polis is to bring these evaluative horizons into the open, asking not only whether a tool “works,” but toward which goods it is ordered. This is why Gert Biesta argues that the age of measurement has displaced the question of purpose, making metrics the master rather than the servant of education (Biesta, 2010). And it is why John Dewey insists that education is not a private investment but a public practice for cultivating habits of cooperation and inquiry central to democratic life (Dewey, 1916). Taylor’s framework thus provides the philosophical grounding for re-situating educational practice within renewed imaginaries of the common good.

Over the past forty years, education has been reshaped by neoliberal logics that frame learning as an investment and institutions as market actors. This shift is not simply about new policy tools but about a change in the underlying imaginary that guides how education is imagined. Competition, measurement, and merit have become the default language of reform. Neoliberalism, as David Harvey (2005) describes, extends market rationality into all spheres of life, while Wendy Brown (2015) shows how it economises values and subjectivities, recasting citizens as portfolios of “human capital.” Stephen Ball (2012) traces how new policy networks embed these logics in education, fusing corporate interests with state reforms. What emerges is a market imaginary that silently sets the terms of what appears legitimate or possible in education.

A central feature of this imaginary is the dominance of metrics. League tables, rankings, and performance indicators promise accountability, but they also redefine what counts as a good education. Michael Power (1997) captures this dynamic in his account of the “audit society,” where the rituals of verification begin to substitute for substantive improvement. Rankings in higher education provide a vivid example: as Ellen Hazelkorn (2011) documents, global league tables have reshaped institutional priorities, often pushing universities to invest in reputation-building rather than public mission. Espeland and Sauder (2007) show how such measures are reactive, they do not simply record performance but change it, inducing conformity to whatever is being ranked. At the school level, the OECD’s PISA tests (OECD, 2023) have become an influential signal of national educational success, elevating testable outcomes as proxies for quality. What seems like neutral measurement is in fact the inscription of a particular vision of the good.

Within this frame, the “common good” is quietly redefined. Instead of education as a shared project of cultivating judgment, association, and care, the good is measured in individual advancement: employability, graduate salaries, institutional market share. Brown (2015) argues that neoliberal reason hollows out democratic purposes by narrowing collective life to competitive individualism. Ball (2012) shows how this logic is operationalised through contracting and performance management. Gert Biesta (2010) offers a normative critique: in the “age of measurement,” the question of purpose is displaced by the question of effectiveness. When outputs become ends in themselves, the broader “why” of education recedes. Education is no longer judged by its contribution to democratic or ethical life but by the metrics that are easiest to count.

The result is an erosion of relational and collective purposes. Time and energy once devoted to community engagement, dialogue, or formative feedback are redirected into data production and positional competition. What cannot be easily quantified, such as belonging, public responsibility, or democratic agency, risks invisibility. Biesta’s concern is not opposition to measurement but insistence that measurement be governed by purpose. Read alongside John Dewey’s vision of democracy as a way of life sustained by habits of inquiry and cooperation (Dewey, 1916), the market imaginary appears not only narrow but civically corrosive. To counter its dominance, evaluation must be re-anchored in goods that are relational and durable, with metrics constrained to illuminate rather than dictate them. Returning to Taylor’s frame, imaginaries shape what seems obvious in education; the market imaginary has made competition and measurement appear inevitable. Reclaiming education as polis requires unsettling that inevitability and renewing imaginaries of the common good.

Neoliberalism narrows education by redefining its purposes in strictly instrumental terms. Where earlier traditions framed learning as a public good bound up with democratic life, neoliberal imaginaries recast it as an investment in “human capital” and a route to measurable returns. As Wendy Brown (2015) argues, neoliberal reason economises the meanings of citizenship and public life, hollowing out democratic purposes. In education, this has meant a shift in evaluative horizons: what is taken to count as valuable is evidence of productivity, efficiency, and positional advantage rather than judgement, solidarity, or civic participation. This is not just a policy shift but a change in the imaginary, a background picture of what education is for that makes consumer choice and individual advancement seem natural.

Metrics are central to this transformation. Michael Power’s analysis of the “audit society” shows how rituals of verification become substitutes for substantive improvement (Power, 1997). In higher education, global rankings encourage universities to invest in reputation-building and market positioning, often at the expense of public mission (Hazelkorn, 2011). Espeland and Sauder (2007) describe this as “reactivity”: rankings do not merely measure performance, they change it, inducing institutions to conform to what is ranked. At the school level, performance frameworks and comparative assessments such as PISA signal what should be valued, narrowing educational goods to what can be captured by indicators (OECD, 2023). In such contexts, the “common good” is redefined as whatever raises scores or competitive advantage, sidelining less measurable forms of flourishing.

The displacement of solidarity is perhaps most visible in how responsibility for education is recast. Kathleen Lynch (2020) argues that systems systematically devalue affective equality, the recognition of love, care, and interdependence as essential dimensions of justice. When these affective infrastructures are overlooked, the capacity of individuals to participate and flourish collectively is weakened. Martha Nussbaum (2010) likewise warns that when education is treated mainly as an engine of growth, the arts and humanities, subjects that cultivate empathy, imagination, and democratic capability, are marginalised. Without institutional recognition of these relational goods, there is little incentive to protect or resource them, even though they are essential to democratic life.

The new roles this creates for students and teachers exemplify the erosion of collective purpose. Students are increasingly positioned as consumers making rational investments. Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon (2010) describe how this narrows learning to credential acquisition and price–value calculation, often at the expense of collective inquiry or public contribution. Teachers, meanwhile, experience themselves as service providers subject to regimes of performativity. Stephen Ball (2003) shows how accountability cultures reshape professional identity, encouraging compliance with metrics over educational judgement. In both cases, relationships are instrumentalised: the classroom is no longer a site of shared meaning-making but a transaction between provider and client.

These dynamics weaken education’s democratic role. If the aims of education collapse into market metrics, the formation of citizens capable of deliberation, association, and cooperation loses institutional standing. Gert Biesta (2010) insists that the “age of measurement” has displaced the question of purpose with the question of effectiveness, whereas democracy requires the opposite, purposes must govern metrics, not be governed by them. John Dewey’s (1916) vision of democracy as a way of life sustained by habits of inquiry and cooperation underscores the civic loss when solidarity is displaced. Returning to Taylor’s language of imaginaries, the consumer–provider model is not inevitable; it has been normalised by neoliberal logics. Reclaiming education as polis means unsettling that imaginary and restoring shared responsibility and collective flourishing to the centre of what we mean by the common good.

John Dewey offers one of the most compelling accounts of why education is central to democratic life. In Democracy and Education (1916), he argues that democracy is not simply a political arrangement but a way of life: “a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Dewey, 1916, p. 93). Education is the institution through which this way of life is sustained. It is not only about transmitting knowledge or skills but about cultivating the habits of cooperation, inquiry, and communication that enable people to live together democratically.

For Dewey, education is fundamentally participatory and relational. He emphasises that learning happens through interaction, dialogue, and shared problem-solving. In classrooms organised along Deweyan lines, students might work together on community-based projects, investigate problems that matter to them, or deliberate over questions of social importance. These are not just pedagogical strategies but ways of cultivating the capacities that democratic societies require: openness to others, willingness to deliberate, and readiness to reconstruct shared meanings in light of new challenges (Dewey, 1916; Dewey, 1997). All genuine education, he insists, “comes about through experience” (Dewey, 1997, p. 25). Experience is not passive; it is active, communal, and oriented toward growth in common.

This vision stands in sharp contrast to the neoliberal logics that have reshaped education in recent decades. Under neoliberal imaginaries, learners are positioned as consumers, institutions as firms, and success as measurable outputs (Brown, 2015). Competition and ranking become the dominant principles, and the common good is reframed as aggregate individual advancement. Dewey’s democratic imaginary resists this narrowing. Where neoliberalism prizes competition, Dewey emphasises cooperation. Where neoliberalism measures effectiveness, Dewey asks about purpose. Where neoliberalism treats education as private investment, Dewey insists on its public and ethical character.

The difference is especially clear in the treatment of inquiry. In a market logic, inquiry risks being reduced to technical problem-solving in the service of productivity. For Dewey, inquiry is a democratic habit. It requires listening, testing assumptions, and responding to evidence in ways that remain open to revision. These habits sustain democracy itself by nurturing humility, adaptability, and mutual recognition. A classroom that encourages joint inquiry is thus not only preparing students for employment but forming citizens capable of contributing to shared life.

This argument has contemporary resonance. Gert Biesta (2010) warns that in the “age of measurement” the question of effectiveness has displaced the question of purpose. For him, as for Dewey, this inversion is dangerous: metrics should serve democratic purposes, not replace them. Biesta’s critique can be read as an extension of Dewey’s vision into the present, reminding us that the ethical and political dimensions of education cannot be captured by performance indicators alone. Both point to the same conclusion: education is valuable not only for what individuals gain but for how it equips societies to live together justly.

Dewey’s insistence that democracy must be continually reconstructed through education offers a crucial counterweight to neoliberal imaginaries. If schools and universities are reduced to sites of competition, their civic role is eroded. But if they are understood as institutions for cultivating the habits of cooperation and inquiry, they can sustain democracy in both spirit and practice. To reclaim education as polis is to take seriously Dewey’s insight that education is democracy’s ongoing project, not its afterthought.

Cornelius Castoriadis provides a conceptual framework that helps us see education not as a neutral transmission of knowledge but as a space where society’s capacity for self-creation can be cultivated. In The Imaginary Institution of Society, he argues that all societies are constituted by a social imaginary, the creative horizon of shared meanings and values that give institutions their sense and legitimacy (Castoriadis, 1997a). These meanings, which he calls social imaginary significations, are not simple reflections of economic structures or rational principles. They are collectively imagined ideas such as “progress,” “citizenship,” or “growth” that make sense of practices and guide action. Put simply, societies live by large, shared stories that define what counts as valuable and possible.

Castoriadis distinguishes between the instituted society (the relatively stable norms and structures in place) and the instituting society (the ongoing creative power to question and remake those norms). Most societies, he warns, mask their instituting capacity by naturalising existing arrangements, presenting them as if they could not be otherwise. A democratic society is unique because it seeks to make this instituting power explicit. As he puts it, “autonomy is the lucid self-institution of society” (Castoriadis, 1991, p. 164). Democracy is therefore not only about procedures for electing leaders but about the collective ability to reflect on and reshape the rules that govern common life.

This is why autonomy, for Castoriadis, cannot be reduced to individual freedom. While individual autonomy matters, it is sustained only within a society that recognises itself as self-instituting and open to critique. Education is central to this project. It is not simply preparation for predetermined roles but a form of paideia, the formation of citizens capable of questioning inherited meanings and participating in their transformation (Castoriadis, 1997b). In this sense, classrooms and universities are not just delivery mechanisms for skills but arenas where norms can be co-created. Practices such as participatory curriculum design, collective decision-making, and deliberative dialogue are not optional extras but expressions of education’s democratic role.

Examples make this vision concrete. A classroom that invites students to co-author assessment criteria is not merely being innovative; it is enacting autonomy in Castoriadis’s sense, showing that rules are human creations that can be rethought together. Similarly, when universities involve students and communities in shaping curricula around shared social problems, they treat education as an arena of democratic self-institution rather than a marketplace transaction.

This view contrasts sharply with neoliberal imaginaries. In the neoliberal frame, education is judged by its ability to produce competitive individuals and measurable outcomes. Rankings, metrics, and employability become the central goods. From a Castoriadian perspective, this is a closure of the instituting dimension of society: education is made to serve existing indicators rather than to question or remake them. By contrast, education oriented to autonomy fosters the capacity to interrogate ends as well as means, to take shared responsibility for collective life, and to imagine alternatives. As Castoriadis writes, “society is not given; it is self-creation” (Castoriadis, 1997a, p. 127). Education worthy of the name must therefore cultivate that capacity for self-creation, not merely adapt learners to what already is.

Framed this way, education becomes an arena for democratic self-institution. Its purpose is to enlarge the circle of those who can participate in shaping the norms and institutions that govern their lives. This does not mean abandoning standards but making them subject to collective reasoning and revision. To reclaim education as polis is to adopt Castoriadis’s insight that the common good depends on sustaining our shared ability to question, create, and take responsibility for the worlds we build together.

A renewed imaginary of education must re-anchor it in democracy rather than markets. Against neoliberal logics that treat education as a competitive investment, this perspective recasts education as a shared project of living together. Drawing on Dewey’s vision of democracy as a way of life (Dewey, 1916), Castoriadis’s idea of society as self-instituting (Castoriadis, 1997), and Taylor’s notion of social imaginaries (Taylor, 2004), we can frame participation, plurality, and care as guiding values. These values do not merely decorate education; they define what it is for.

Participation means widening who gets to shape purposes and practices. In contrast to technocratic models where goals are predetermined, democratic education treats purposes as open to deliberation. This could involve students and educators co-authoring learning outcomes, staff–student committees with genuine authority over assessment policy, or university–community partnerships in which curricula are co-designed with civic groups. For example, some UK universities have experimented with co-created modules where students and staff set reading lists and project themes together, shifting the balance from consumption to shared authorship. Such practices embody Castoriadis’s idea of autonomy as collective self-institution: people making and remaking the rules that shape their lives.

Plurality acknowledges that no single measure or method can capture the full value of education. A plural evaluation ecology resists the narrowing of rankings and audit cultures (Power, 1997). It might combine quantitative indicators with qualitative evidence such as portfolios, exhibitions, reflective essays, or public projects. Instead of reducing outcomes to test scores, institutions can showcase multiple forms of achievement. Curricular plurality also matters: STEM education should sit alongside the humanities and arts, which, as Nussbaum (2010) reminds us, nurture imagination and empathy essential for democratic capability. A plural imaginary values different ways of knowing and doing, keeping education open to novelty and risk (Biesta, 2013).

Care is the relational foundation of participation and plurality. Kathleen Lynch (2020) highlights “affective equality,” the recognition that love, care, and interdependence are central to justice. Without such recognition, many cannot participate as equals. Educationally, this means treating mentoring, advising, and pastoral support not as hidden extras but as core academic work. Policies that allocate time and resources for care, such as reduced teaching loads for staff in advising-intensive roles, signal that relationships are valued as much as metrics. Care is not sentimental; it is the infrastructure that makes democratic participation possible.

These values help reframe the common good. Instead of equating it with aggregate individual achievement or graduate salaries, the common good is a shared pursuit: cultivating capacities for inquiry, dialogue, and cooperation. Education serves the common good when it forms citizens who can deliberate together and renew their institutions, not just workers who compete for advantage (Dewey, 1916; Taylor, 2004).

Resisting instrumentalisation requires action at both practice and policy levels. In practice, this could mean participatory curriculum design, assessment focused on public contribution, or inquiry projects tied to local challenges. At policy level, charters could require institutions to justify metrics against democratically defined purposes (Biesta, 2010). Evaluation frameworks should combine numbers with narratives, ensuring that what is measured reflects what communities value. Funding models could reward civic partnerships, open educational resources, or community-engaged research alongside throughput and market performance. These steps do not reject standards; they situate them within an explicit democratic horizon where purposes come first.

A renewed imaginary of education, grounded in participation, plurality, and care, directly contests the neoliberal framing of learning as private gain. It reclaims education as polis, a shared space of imagination and responsibility, where the common good is continually created together.

This post has argued that imaginaries shape what education is for. Charles Taylor (2004) reminds us that social imaginaries are the background pictures that orient our practices. They tell us what counts as legitimate action and shared purpose. In education, these imaginaries matter profoundly. When dominated by market logics, education becomes a competitive investment, valued through outputs, rankings, and efficiency. When reimagined democratically, it becomes a shared pursuit of inquiry, cooperation, and care.

The stakes are high because imaginaries do not merely describe the world; they prescribe it. If students are imagined as consumers and teachers as service providers, the purposes of education shift toward private gain and measurable efficiency (Ball, 2003; Molesworth, Scullion and Nixon, 2011). Conversely, if education is imagined as a common project, it can cultivate the habits of judgment, association, and solidarity on which democracy depends (Dewey, 1916; Biesta, 2010). The choice between these imaginaries is not technical but moral and political. It forces us to ask: should education reproduce the logic of the market, or renew the practices of democracy?

This is more than a theoretical debate. Consider the rise of audit cultures in universities. As Michael Power (1997) shows, the “rituals of verification” have become central to institutional life. League tables and performance indicators determine funding, reputation, and even staffing. Stephen Ball (2003) describes how such pressures reshape teachers’ professional identities, encouraging strategic compliance rather than educational judgment. Here, the market imaginary is lived daily in timetables, targets, and workloads. It closes down the space for educators and students to deliberate about what education is for.

Against this closure, Cornelius Castoriadis (1997) offers an alternative: societies are self-instituting, creating and recreating their institutions through shared meanings. Autonomy, in his sense, is collective, the recognition that we can question inherited rules and remake them together. Education, when aligned with this vision, becomes a site of democratic self-institution. It is where people learn not only about the world but how to make and remake it.

This is both a moral responsibility and a political project. Morally, because the values at stake, participation, plurality, and care, speak to what it means to live well together. Politically, because imaginaries sediment into institutions, policies, and funding systems (Brown, 2015). Choosing a renewed democratic imaginary means resisting the reduction of education to market metrics and opening space for shared purposes. It requires institutions to be explicit about the goods they pursue and to justify their practices against those goods, not against abstract performance benchmarks.

The argument developed here points toward the concerns of later posts in this series. If this post has focused on how imaginaries shape the common good, the next steps will explore how institutions can embody democratic imaginaries in their governance, evaluation, and culture. They will ask how collective responsibility can be reclaimed in practice: through participatory decision-making, plural assessment, and infrastructures of care. Each of these is an act of re-institution, remaking education to serve democracy rather than markets.

Imaginaries are not abstractions. They guide our choices and shape our futures. To move from market logic to democratic renewal is to make a conscious decision about what we want education to be. That decision is urgent. It is about more than classrooms or curricula; it is about the kind of society we choose to build. Reclaiming education as polis means recognising our collective power to imagine otherwise, and to act on that imagination.

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