Education, at least since the birth of the Enlightenment, has been considered a vehicle through which the light of truth and prosperity would come to shine on the people. Through education people could live an emancipated life free from the burdens of ignorance. Today one can wonder if there is any room for emancipation in educational policies spread over the world, and particularly in Europe, as education seems to have more to do with work-force politics than about emancipating citizens. Education in the self-proclaimed “knowledge societies” tends to be reduced to being the exclusive vehicle for getting a job rather than learning the grammar for reading the complexities of the society in which one lives. An education without emancipation, though, I argue in the paper, is really no education at all. It is, rather, the defining characteristics of the myth of schooling, which distributes places and spaces in the social order in which you become what you already are. The myth of schooling, as I define it, is the idea that schooling is supposed to be a representation of “true” life and a place for the distribution of experiences that in themselves make sense of living in a particular society. Rather, being properly schooled through the institution means that one has to accept that schooling reveals the inner truth of society in which one is supposed to have a reserved place corresponding to that truth (Säfström, 2003). Or in simple words, schooling is about getting a job corresponding to one’s place in the social order prepared for by schooling. By contrast emancipation, which I understand to be central for any conception of education, always happens in the interplay between “the order of truth” and the disturbance of that order. In this paper I discuss the possibility of the idea of emancipation within an educational philosophy that does not accept schooling as its first premise. The first part of the paper will broadly sketch some trends in educational policies in Europe, such as life long learning, accountability and evidence-based research, and argue that these words are only meaningful within the myth of schooling and not in a language of education/emancipation. The second part of the paper discusses different but related conceptions of emancipation. In the third part of the paper I specify the role and place of emancipation within a philosophy of education that seeks to articulate its social value.

This paper takes a philosophical approach to the question of emancipation. It draws on Jacques Rancière’s (1999) ideas of intellectual emancipation, and his critique of the idea of pedagogy as a reproduction of unequal relationships. I discuss this in relation to Ernesto Laclau’s (2007) explication of the concept of emancipation itself.

In the concluding section I discuss the implications of the idea that no one has the role of emancipating anyone else, which would be, so to speak, to defeat the purpose. My main point is that teachers can encourage the process of self-emancipation by educating students to become attentive readers of the social order in which they live.