In Europe and elsewhere, education systems live in a state of asymmetry. The decline of the traditional welfare state and the dominance of the neoliberal agenda are paving the way to soft privatisation and, in some cases, to the privatisation of educational offers (S. Ball, 2009; Cone & Brøgger, 2020; Lingard & Sellar, 2013). These processes concern not only the governance of the systems but are deeply entrenched with a re-culturing of education that appears more and more enclosed in the coordinates of neoliberal thought with increased effects on educational inequalities. This imbalance redefines the boundaries between the public and the private, problematising the differences and making even some of the current critical frames inadequate to grasp the current transformations. The same recurrent accuses of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘New Public Management’ as the main causes of the complex changes in education look out of tune as if the solution could be simply the reversal of the state of asymmetry. Frequently, they are conveyed with a nostalgia that underestimates how the same configuration of the state in education is partly responsible for the reproduction of educational inequalities and the shift to the neoliberal agenda, as was underlined by past educational research. Also, it does not sufficiently consider how a conservative and nationalistic agenda supports the state's return to education. To move beyond neoliberal imagery without slipping back into a conservative nation-state agenda, a possibility is to abandon the logic of ‘either/or’ of these reasonings and unfold assemblage thinking in education governance (Gorur, 2011; Landri & Gorur, 2022; Youdell, 2015) . While theoretically promising, this shift is not without risk. By drawing on a long research program on changing the governance of education in Italy ( Landri, 2018), and notably on the current post-pandemic transformations, I will contrast 1) parasitic assemblages, like in the digital governance of education, where the big multimedia companies dominate education systems with their platforms and 2) generative assemblages, as in the recent policy of ‘community pacts’ that are orientated towards equity and inclusion. While parasitic assemblage is again enclosed in a state of asymmetry, generative assemblages enact symmetrical exchanges, and education is seen as common.

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