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Stephen Wheeler | eLearning Technologist

Reclaiming Education as a Democratic Institution - A Manifesto for the Common Good

Published on (2025-09-28) by Stephen Wheeler.

Retrofuturist civic agora: open book on circuit-board plaza, diverse people gathering, modular terraces and trees, networked stars over a sunrise horizon.

Introduction

The ambition of this series has been to reclaim education as polis: a shared space of imagination, responsibility, and renewal. Against the narrowing tendencies of market-driven imaginaries and technological determinism, the series has sought to reframe education as a public and democratic project, one that cannot be reduced to a private good or transactional service. To speak of education as polis is to foreground its irreducibly relational and world-making dimensions, insisting that pedagogy, policy, and infrastructure must be oriented not to efficiency or metrics, but to sustaining a common world capable of renewal by those who come after us.

Several conceptual threads have guided this argument. Hannah Arendt’s work is central, particularly her notion of the polis as the realm of appearance where individuals come together in speech and action (Arendt, 2018). For Arendt, education is intimately bound to the possibility of natality, the fact that each child represents a new beginning in the world. Education, therefore, is not a matter of reproducing sameness but of caring for the conditions under which plurality and newness can flourish (Arendt, 2006). This emphasis on plurality aligns with the democratic impulse of education: to sustain difference, dialogue, and mutual responsibility.

Charles Taylor’s account of moral frameworks and strong evaluation highlights how imaginaries of the common good shape educational practice (Taylor, 1989). John Dewey’s democratic vision further situates education as a social project, where the cultivation of intelligence, cooperation, and mutual growth sustains democracy as a way of life. For Dewey, democracy is “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living” (Dewey, 1916, p. 87). If Taylor points to the horizons of meaning within which education unfolds, Dewey insists that those horizons must be lived through shared inquiry and practice. Together, they establish that education is not a neutral mechanism but a normative project, one that makes visible what we value as a society.

Cornelius Castoriadis extends this line of thought by framing autonomy as both individual and collective, inseparable dimensions of the instituting power of society (Castoriadis, 1997). Autonomy is not merely the independence of the learner but the capacity of a community to reflect upon and transform its own institutions. In education, this points to a vision of agency that is not atomised but participatory, grounded in responsibility to others. Gert Biesta builds on this with his notion of subjectification, the “beautiful risk” of education that resists instrumentalisation in favour of fostering the unpredictable emergence of the subject (Biesta, 2013). Where Arendt emphasises natality, Biesta underscores risk; both resist enclosure and affirm education as a space of openness.

The series has also traced how institutions and technologies act as structuring forces. Educational infrastructures, from the learning management system to assessment platforms, are not neutral tools but institutions that embody imaginaries and reproduce social orders. As Andrew Feenberg argues, technology is never simply an instrument; it is always political, shaped by and shaping social relations (Feenberg, 1999). More recently, work in critical infrastructure studies has underlined that platforms and protocols configure participation and delimit what is possible in public life (Plantin and Punathambekar, 2019). If infrastructures embody imaginaries, then reclaiming education requires that we design and inhabit them differently, with public values at their core.

Finally, the theme of plurality and natality brings us back to the promise of education as openness to the future. Standardisation, automation, and enclosure threaten this promise by closing off difference and reducing education to a predictable process. To resist this closure is to insist on education as an unfinished project, oriented to the common good and to the imaginative possibilities of collective world-making.

This concluding post, then, positions itself as both synthesis and manifesto. It gathers these threads, polis, common good, autonomy, institution, plurality, and reframes them as principles for reclaiming education as a democratic institution. What is at stake is not only the form of pedagogy, assessment, or digital platforms, but the very conditions of public life itself. The aim is not closure but a call to action: to re-institute education as a space where autonomy, plurality, care, responsibility, and imagination are not only preserved but enacted. The discussion that follows turns explicitly to the practical and political implications for pedagogy, assessment, and digital infrastructures, articulating a vision of education as a living commons in the age of platforms.

Why Reclaiming Education Matters Now

The urgency of reclaiming education as a democratic institution is sharpened by the combined pressures of artificial intelligence and platform capitalism. Educational activity has increasingly been rendered as data and subjected to logics of optimisation: prediction, efficiency, benchmarking, and control. These dynamics are not accidental. They emerge from business models that profit from the capture and extraction of behavioural data (Zuboff, 2019) and from platform architectures designed for scale and rent-seeking (Srnicek, 2017). Within education, the rise of key performance indicators, learning analytics, and dashboards exemplifies how quantification becomes an end in itself, narrowing the purposes of education to what is easily measured (Muller, 2018) and displacing the question of educational goodness with the convenience of metrics (Biesta, 2010).

The risks of enclosure by markets and metrics are profound. When value is equated with measurable outputs, plurality is treated as noise, autonomy is reduced to procedural self-management, and democratic imagination is eclipsed by compliance. In this respect, education reflects wider patterns of neoliberal rationality, in which public institutions are transformed into instruments of competition and performance (Brown, 2015). What is lost is precisely what earlier sections of this series have emphasised: autonomy as a shared responsibility (Castoriadis, 1997), plurality as the condition of democratic life (Arendt, 2018), and natality as the promise of renewal (Arendt, 2006). Standardised pathways and automated judgments pre-empt the very encounters through which difference and imagination might emerge (Biesta, 2013; Dewey, 1916).

These risks are intensified by the infrastructural character of platforms. Technologies are not neutral tools; they are institutions that crystallise imaginaries and redistribute agency (Winner, 1980; Feenberg, 1999). The designation “platform” itself carries a politics, presenting systems as neutral intermediaries while quietly shaping participation, visibility, and governance (Gillespie, 2010; 2018). Critical infrastructure studies have shown that pipes, protocols, and classifications are not merely technical details: they structure what is possible in social life (Bowker and Star, 1999; Plantin et al., 2018). In educational contexts, the learning management system, assessment platform, and algorithmic recommender are not simply delivery mechanisms. They encode and reproduce assumptions about what learning is, how it should be valued, and who counts as a participant.

For these reasons, education must resist capture and reclaim its public, democratic role. Resistance here is not only oppositional but reinstituting: the deliberate design and inhabitation of infrastructures that align with public values. These values include transparency, revisability, accountability, care, and openness to plurality. They can be glimpsed in open-source infrastructures, federated learning environments, and commons-based projects that treat learners and educators not as data points but as co-governors of the systems they inhabit. Reclaiming education in this sense means re-centring judgment over measurement, renewing pedagogies that sustain plurality and dialogue, and building digital architectures that expand rather than close down collective imagination.

What is at stake is not simply the shape of pedagogy or the design of platforms. It is the very possibility of education as a public good and as a democratic project. If infrastructures sediment unchecked, they will continue to erode autonomy, reduce plurality, and foreclose imagination. To reclaim education is therefore to defend the conditions of democracy itself, ensuring that the common world remains open to renewal by those who come after us.

Principles for Re-Instituting Education

To re-institute education as a democratic institution means more than resisting market logics: it requires orienting pedagogy, policy, and infrastructure around principles that sustain education as a shared world-making project. Five such principles, autonomy, plurality, care, responsibility, and imagination, converge in a commons ethos, where education is stewarded collectively rather than enclosed as a private commodity.

Autonomy

Autonomy cannot be reduced to the neoliberal image of the “self-managing learner,” navigating predesigned pathways under the guise of choice. As Castoriadis reminds us, autonomy is both individual and collective: the ability to interrogate instituted meanings and to create institutions anew (Castoriadis, 1997). In educational terms, this requires opportunities for students and staff to deliberate over purposes and shape their learning environments. Gert Biesta calls this the “beautiful risk” of education: the unpredictable emergence of the subject through encounters that cannot be predetermined or automated (Biesta, 2013). Autonomy, then, is not isolation but participation in collective self-governance.

Plurality

Plurality is the condition for democratic renewal. For Arendt, the polis exists because distinct persons appear in speech and action, each newcomer representing a beginning that can transform the world (Arendt, 2018; 2006). Education must sustain this possibility by resisting the homogenising tendencies of standardisation and automation. When learning platforms deliver uniform pathways and assessments reduce diversity to metrics, the plurality of perspectives is diminished. Designing for plurality means preserving spaces of dialogue, valuing difference as a resource, and enabling students to appear as who they are rather than who the system predicts them to be.

Care

Care expresses responsibility for the shared world and for future generations. Arendt emphasised that education is where adults assume responsibility for introducing children to the world while preserving its openness to change (Arendt, 2006). Care is also central to feminist ethics of education: Nel Noddings argues that caring relationships are foundational for educational practice (Noddings, 2013), while Joan Tronto stresses the political dimensions of care as attentiveness and responsiveness to interdependence (Tronto, 1993). To practice care in education means building pedagogies that foster relationships, infrastructures that prioritise transparency and repair, and policies that safeguard time for reflection rather than maximising throughput.

Responsibility

Educators and institutions are custodians of the common good, not service providers responding to consumer demand. Responsibility requires accountability that is dialogical rather than purely metric, oriented to sustaining spaces where judgment, inquiry, and disagreement can flourish (Biesta, 2010). This principle echoes Ostrom’s design rules for commons governance, which emphasise participatory rule-making, monitoring, and collective stewardship (Ostrom, 2015). In practice, responsibility might mean student-staff partnerships in curriculum design, co-governance of digital platforms, or transparent oversight of assessment systems. Responsibility anchors education in public trust rather than private gain.

Imagination

Imagination is the instituting power of education: the collective capacity to generate new possibilities and resist closure (Castoriadis, 1997). It is cultivated in inquiry that exceeds prediction, in projects requiring cooperation, and in infrastructures that enable contribution rather than passive consumption. Yochai Benkler’s account of commons-based peer production shows how shared resources and meaningful participation can generate knowledge and innovation outside market logics (Benkler, 2006). Imagination is thus not escapism but public work: the practice of making otherwise in and through education.

Commons and Stewardship

Together, these principles converge in a vision of education as a commons. Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that commons endure when communities co-design and enforce their own rules, resolve conflicts, and adapt to change (Ostrom, 2015). Hess and Ostrom (2007) extend this to knowledge, framing it as a resource best sustained through collective stewardship. More recently, Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg (2014) explore governance of knowledge commons in contexts ranging from science to digital platforms. Re-instituting education as a commons means curricula, infrastructures, and data practices are treated as shared resources, open to revision, and governed by those who inhabit them. In this way, autonomy, plurality, care, responsibility, and imagination are not abstract ideals but practical commitments embedded in the design and governance of education itself.

Implications for Pedagogy and Assessment

Re-instituting education as a democratic institution requires rethinking pedagogy and assessment so that they resist the narrowing pull of metrics and automation. At stake is not simply how we measure achievement, but how we cultivate judgment, plurality, and imagination in educational practice.

Assessment as Judgment

Assessment must be understood as judgment rather than mere measurement. While metrics can provide information, they cannot replace the interpretive work of educators deciding what counts as worthwhile achievement. As Biesta argues, when measurement displaces judgment, education loses its ethical and political bearings (Biesta, 2010). Samuel Messick’s influential work on validity underscores this point: validity is not only about technical alignment but also about the consequences of assessment practices (Messick, 1987). Metrics that claim objectivity risk obscuring the values embedded in assessment decisions, thereby narrowing autonomy and diminishing plurality. Judgment-centred assessment, by contrast, preserves space for deliberation, professional expertise, and contextual sensitivity.

Authenticity and Plurality

Designing for authenticity means tasks that connect learning with meaningful contexts, echoing the complexity of public life. Wiggins (1990) argued that authentic assessment requires students to perform meaningful tasks that demonstrate their understanding, rather than simply complete standardised exercises. Archbald and Newmann (1988) similarly emphasised that authentic academic achievement involves complex intellectual work that goes beyond recall or routine skill. Plurality further insists that no single form of evidence can exhaustively capture learning. Students should be able to demonstrate achievement in diverse modes, written, oral, collaborative, creative, reflecting the multiplicity of ways in which understanding can be made visible (Sadler, 1989). Standardisation and automation threaten both authenticity and plurality: algorithmic scoring privileges what can be recognised at scale, sidelining originality, ambiguity, and dissent. As Muller (2018) warns, the tyranny of metrics reduces complexity to what is countable, eroding democratic imagination.

Pedagogy as Dialogue and Co-Creation

Pedagogy should be understood as the practice of sustaining openness, dialogue, and co-creation. Dewey framed education as collaborative inquiry into problems of common concern (Dewey, 1916), while Freire (2000) argued for dialogical pedagogy in which teachers and students become co-authors of knowledge. Contemporary work on student-staff partnership translates this ethos into institutional practice: involving students in curriculum design, assessment governance, and feedback systems (Cook-Sather, Bovill and Felten, 2014). Formative assessment is the engine of such pedagogy. Black and Wiliam (1998) showed that high-quality feedback and opportunities for improvement are crucial to learning gains. Sadler (1989) adds that students must learn to judge quality themselves, cultivating autonomy by participating in evaluative practice. Together, these perspectives frame pedagogy not as transmission but as world-making through shared judgment.

The Beautiful Risk of Education

Education cannot be reduced to prediction or control. Biesta (2013) names this the “beautiful risk”: the unpredictable emergence of subjectivity that resists capture by metrics. Designing for this risk means creating open-textured tasks where learners can exercise judgment, imagination, and responsibility. It means privileging feedback over finality, rubrics that invite justification rather than box-ticking, and projects that demand interpretation rather than replication. A student-led inquiry project or a collaborative design challenge illustrates this ethos: outcomes cannot be fully specified in advance, yet the process educates by requiring students to navigate plurality, uncertainty, and responsibility. The risk is beautiful because it opens education to the possibility of the new.

Taken together, these implications call for an assessment culture that prizes authenticity and plurality, treats evidence as plural and situated, and foregrounds judgment as a collective practice. Pedagogy becomes the art of sustaining openness and co-creation. Assessment ceases to be a mechanism of control and becomes instead a practice of freedom, cultivating the capacities of learners and educators alike to make wise judgments in a shared world.

Implications for Digital Infrastructures

The Hidden Curriculum of the LMS

Learning platforms do not simply deliver pedagogy; they institute it. Their categories, workflows, and gradebook logics form a “hidden curriculum” that defines what counts as participation, achievement, or engagement. As Winner (1980) and Feenberg (1999) emphasise, technologies are never neutral, they embody politics and redistribute agency. The LMS constrains plurality by privileging certain modes of expression, often those that can be easily quantified. It narrows autonomy to procedural self-management rather than collective responsibility, and it diminishes care by reducing relationships to metrics of interaction. Classification systems, as Bowker and Star (1999) show, make some practices legible while rendering others invisible, creating an institutional horizon for pedagogy. Gillespie’s account of platform politics (2010; 2018) reminds us that design decisions, from how discussion forums are structured to how grades are displayed, shape who is visible, who is heard, and how authority is distributed. The hidden curriculum of the LMS is therefore not accidental but constitutive.

Democratic Design Principles: Transparency, Revisability, Accountability

If infrastructures institute values, they must be designed for democracy. Transparency is necessary, but transparency alone is insufficient. As Ananny and Crawford (2018) and Burrell (2016) argue, the mere visibility of code or dashboards does not make systems understandable or actionable. What matters is revisability, the capacity of users to contest and change rules, workflows, and defaults, and accountability, clear responsibility for decisions, channels for appeal, and structures for redress (Diakopoulos, 2016; Lessig, 1999). A democratic infrastructure is one that can be inspected, challenged, and altered by those who inhabit it. This is not a technical add-on but a constitutional matter: code and defaults are laws that govern educational life.

Platforms as Commons: Resisting Enclosure, Designing for Public Values

Education must be re-instituted as a commons. Commons are not free-for-alls but shared resources sustained by communities through collectively designed rules (Ostrom, 2015). In the digital sphere, commons-based approaches have demonstrated resilience and public value: Yochai Benkler (2006) highlights how peer production generates knowledge outside market logics; Hess and Ostrom (2007) extend this to the governance of knowledge resources; and Frischmann, Madison and Strandburg (2014) show how knowledge commons endure across diverse contexts. Conceiving educational platforms as commons resists enclosure by vendors and metrics. It reframes curricula, data, and infrastructures as shared goods, to be stewarded collectively and oriented to plurality, autonomy, and imagination.

Examples and Educator Agency

Examples of commons-based infrastructures are already visible. Open-source platforms such as Moodle make code and governance transparent and alterable. Federated systems like Mastodon, built on the ActivityPub protocol, resist centralised control by distributing authority across communities. Public sector digital initiatives, such as the UK’s Government Digital Service, illustrate how digital infrastructures can be designed for public purpose rather than profit. Yet technology alone cannot guarantee democratic outcomes. Following Feenberg’s (1999) notion of “democratic rationalisation,” educators must engage critically with design: questioning data practices, insisting on procurement criteria that embed public values, and experimenting with alternatives. To teach for democracy requires inhabiting democratic infrastructures. Pedagogy thus extends beyond the classroom into infrastructural stewardship: treating platforms themselves as part of the curriculum of democracy.

Educators as Moral Agents of Reinstitution

To speak of reinstitution with Castoriadis is to recognise that institutions are never fixed but always open to renewal. Society is not only instituted, it is instituting. Autonomy, for Castoriadis, is the capacity of individuals and communities to question existing arrangements and to create new forms of life together; imagination is the power that makes such novelty possible (Castoriadis, 1997). In education, this means educators are not simply implementers of policy or technology. They are active participants in re-making the very purposes, practices, and infrastructures that define what education is.

This requires resisting the passive adoption of market logics. Neoliberal rationality, as Brown (2015) shows, reframes public institutions as competitive enterprises, and Apple (2006) details how standards and accountability regimes reshape educational work around external metrics. When teachers accept these logics as inevitable, pedagogical judgment gives way to compliance and the common good is subordinated to performance indicators. Resisting this does not mean rejecting accountability, but reasserting it as a public, dialogical practice oriented to educational goods that cannot be captured by metrics alone (Biesta, 2010). To reinstitute education is to reclaim the authority to define what counts as good work and good learning.

Educators’ agency is moral as well as professional. MacIntyre (2007) argued that practices have “internal goods” that risk corruption when subordinated to external rewards. For education, these goods include truthful inquiry, dialogical judgment, and care for the world. Educators are custodians of these goods. Moral agency here is not just personal integrity but a refusal to collude in practices that reduce students to customers or data points. It is professional courage expressed in everyday choices: designing tasks that invite interpretation rather than replication, sustaining plurality in assessment, or foregrounding care in classroom relations (Dewey, 1916; Freire, 2000; Biesta, 2013). It extends to infrastructure: configuring or contesting learning platforms to uphold transparency and accountability, rather than accepting defaults that enclose participation (Feenberg, 1999).

Such agency also means enacting the principles articulated earlier in this manifesto. Educators realise autonomy by cultivating students’ capacity for judgment; they sustain plurality by opening spaces where diverse voices can appear and be heard (Arendt, 2018; 2006); they embody care in feedback, mentoring, and stewardship of institutional resources; and they nurture imagination by inviting students to envisage alternatives and co-create knowledge. Reinstitution is therefore not abstract. It is practiced in curriculum design, in assessment moderation, in how digital tools are adopted or resisted, and in the everyday pedagogical encounter.

This work is collective, not solitary. Giroux (2024) portrays teachers as transformative intellectuals who challenge dominant logics and build cultures of critique. Nussbaum (2010) insists that education should nourish the democratic capacities of judgment, imagination, and care for others. Taken together, these perspectives cast educators as moral agents of reinstitution, custodians of the common good who, in their everyday practices, sustain education as a democratic project. The call is clear: to teach for democracy requires inhabiting democracy, not only in classroom dialogue but in the infrastructures, assessments, and policies educators co-author. By exercising judgment, resisting enclosure, and stewarding institutions for public purpose, educators re-institute education itself as a practice of freedom.

Conclusion

To conclude is not to end. Education remains an unfinished project of democratic imagination: the continual work of making and remaking a shared world with others. Each generation arrives as newcomers, and with them the possibility of beginning again (Arendt, 1958; 1961). To affirm education as polis is to refuse reduction to service, standardisation, or platform efficiency. It is to sustain openness to the yet-to-be.

The common good is not a final consensus but a practice of world-making. Taylor (1989) reminds us that judgments about what matters are not neutral, they are strong evaluations that shape horizons of value. Dewey (1916) likewise describes democracy as a habit of associated living, where the common good is generated through participation, not imposed from above. Castoriadis (1997) adds that autonomy means questioning existing institutions and imagining new ones. Together, these insights demand that education serve as a space where values can be debated, renewed, and reinstituted.

This vision requires resisting closure. Metrics and market logics promise certainty but deliver narrowing: they reduce plurality to what can be counted, and they corrode the internal goods of educational practice. Biesta (2013) names the alternative the “beautiful risk” of education: to embrace the unpredictability of subjectivity, to foster encounters that cannot be scripted in advance. That risk is inseparable from plurality. When students speak in their own voices, when they interpret differently, when they imagine otherwise, the world is renewed. To foreclose risk is to foreclose plurality, and with it, democracy itself.

Infrastructures play a decisive role here. Technologies are never neutral; they distribute power and authority (Winner, 1980; Feenberg, 1999). Platforms decide who can speak, what becomes visible, and which practices are legible (Bowker and Star, 1999; Gillespie, 2018; Plantin et al., 2018). If education is to remain democratic, its infrastructures must be transparent, revisable, and accountable to those who use them. Otherwise, pedagogy is quietly enclosed by defaults and data models. Treating platforms as commons offers another path: stewarding them collectively, resisting enclosure, and aligning them with public values (Ostrom, 1990; Hess and Ostrom, 2007; Benkler, 2006).

Concrete examples already exist. Authentic assessment practices that involve students in defining criteria resist standardisation and keep judgment dialogical. Student-staff partnerships in curriculum design expand plurality and co-creation. Adoption of open-source platforms such as Moodle or federated systems like Mastodon shows how infrastructures can embody autonomy and collective stewardship. Each instance enacts reinstitution: the practical re-alignment of tools and practices with the internal goods of education.

The call, then, is clear. Education is not a service. It is not a commodity. It is a commons. Its health depends on educators, students, and communities who act as custodians of autonomy, plurality, and imagination. To teach for democracy requires inhabiting democracy, in classrooms, in assessments, in policies, and in the infrastructures that frame them. This series closes, but the work begins again: to resist closure, to sustain openness, and to keep education alive as a practice of freedom.

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