This paper is motivated by a concern that the aspiration for leading a public or ‘worldly’ (Arendt) life seems to be threatened in Europe today. Even if the core purpose of European education since World War II has been to strengthen public life through democratic citizenship formation, the fostering task of education has, paradoxically, become marginalized and privatized despite its public urgency. As a way of responding to this situation, we take Jan Masschelein and Maarten Simon’s (2013) reinvention of the public school as an invitation to rethink the fostering task of the teacher. Central to Masschelein and Simons (2013) idea of the public school is what they see as its essential ‘commoning’ or democratic operation. Inspired by the Greek distinction between the polis and the scholè (as free time), the aim of their scholastic techniques is to strengthen the public voice of the teacher and to gather teachers and pupils together around a common ‘thing’ in order to make the world public and shared through study and exercise.

We argue, however, following Arendt (1958), that ‘the public’ seems to be based on an inherent opposition in at least three different but interrelated meanings: a) what is common and shared opposed to what is individual and particular; b) what is visible and exposed opposed to what is hidden and secret; and c) what is open and accessible opposed to what is closed and unavailable. Since the time of the Greek polis, the common, the visible and the open have been constituting the meaning of ‘the public’ (with masculine connotations), while the particular, the hidden and the closed have been associated with ‘the private’ (with feminine connotations). Hence, even if we are in agreement with Masschelein and Simons on the distinction between the polis and the scholè, we wish to highlight what seems to go unnoticed in their work, namely that a reinvention of the public school is unthinkable without a notion of the private and the feminine. Thus, the aim of the paper is to direct attention to the pedagogical potential of what is particular, hidden and closed and to explore the consequences of this feminist turn for the strengthening of public life as well as for the fostering task of the teacher. 

According to Masschelein and Simons (2013), three of the educational ‘acts’ or scholastic techniques that makes the democratic sharing of the world possible is suspension, profanation and love. In what follows we re-read these techniques through the lens of poststructural feminist critique (Irigaray, Kristeva, Derrida) arguing that they have private and feminine connotations that need to be acknowledged when rethinking the fostering task of the school. More specifically, the paper reads suspension through the concept of hospitality, profanation through the concept of the secret, and love through the concept of the maternal. The argument is that in order for the reinvention of the public school and the fostering task of education not to become a masculine endeavour, it also needs to acknowledge the welcoming, sanctifying and the afflicted gestures that lie at the heart of education. This altered perspective is articulated in the paper by making a shift from scholastic techniques to scholastic gestures.

Arendt, H. 1961. Between Past and Future. London: Faber and Faber. ———. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irigaray, L. 2008. Sharing the World. London: Continuum. Kristeva, J. 1987. Tales of Love. New York : Columbia University Press. Masschelein, J. & Simons, M. 2013. In Defence of the School. A Public Issue. Leuven: E-ducation, Culture & Society. Noddings, N. 2010. The Maternal Factor: two paths to morality. Berkeley, Calif. ; University of California Press. Derrida, J. 2000. Of Hospitality. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press