This study addresses the imperilled public character of the national curriculum by theorising it as an achievement of "mediated publicness." We argue that the publicness of curriculum-making does not derive from models of direct democratic participation (Hopmann, 1999), but from a precarious political and structural achievement we theorise as “mediated publicness”. We rely on Finland as a critical case study to demonstrate how this manifests institutionally in a national context, and point to the processes whereby it’s being systematically dismantled.

This theorisation incorporates the notion of resource withdrawal (after Biesta, 2023), where publicness is materially founded on resources – financial, institutional, professional – diverted from private, sectional circuits and dedicated to collective, intergenerational purposes. This collective and intergenerational responsibility (Shcleiermacher, 1826/2022) emerges from the duty of the older generation to the younger, where curriculum confronts the “natality” of new generations (Arendt, 1958), posing an inherently public question about what to preserve and transform in our shared world. The state doesn’t create this responsibility but must institutionally recognise and stabilise it against the “chance” of domestic and wider societal circumstances.

Through a critical-historical methodology, we genealogically explore curriculum’s emergence as a public concern. We develop this through a structured case study of the Finnish educational system - a trust-based, professionally mediated system that went through its early phases of state- and church-controlled subjection. This historical exploration is coupled with an analysis of the internal vulnerabilities within the very elements forming its “protective shield” that upholds the mediated publicness.  

We maintain that the Finnish system’s publicness derives from a series of political settlements that materialises into a three-fold protective shield: the guiding principle of Bildung (Autio, 2021) (oriented towards social justice), a national core curriculum that steers professional collective deliberation, and a teaching profession as a trusted mediator (Välimaa, 2021). Beyond identifying the architecture of this protective shield, our central finding is that commodification operates not merely as an external attack, but by exploiting its internal vulnerabilities.

We challenge the assumption that Finnish public education is resilient to global market forces. We articulate a theoretical vocabulary - “mediated publicness” - to describe the precise architecture of this resilience while revealing its profound precarity. We move beyond descriptive accounts of marketisation to offer a systemic theory of how commodification works, and provide a heuristic framework applicable to other Nordic systems. The central political struggle is no longer just for public funding, but for the de-commodification of public resources themselves

This paper relies on conceptual-historical analysis to theorise curriculum publicness and explore its vulnerability to commodification. We proceed through two interconnected modes of inquiry. First, the paper presents a genealogical exploration of the curriculum's emergence as an expression of substantial transformations in the wider social fabric. Following Hamilton (1990), we treat curriculum-making as a series of historical settlements arrived through struggles between competing orientations. From this perspective, it becomes visible that the curriculum's public qualities were neither accidental nor administrative; instead, they were shaped by changing relationships between knowledge, society, and the emerging individual. Second, we move on to developing the concept of “mediated publicness” through engaging with curriculum theory (Hopmann, 1999; Westbury, 2000; Doyle, 2017), and continental pedagogical traditions (Schleiermacher, 1826/2022; Mollenhauer, 2014; Masschelein & Simons, 2013; Biesta, 2023). We bring these frameworks into conversation with each other to establish how curriculum-making acquires public character through specific institutional arrangements and practices rather than through participatory procedures. In this paper, the Finnish case acts as a paradigm. We draw on empirical sources that showcase Finnish curriculum reform processes (Hakala & Kujala, 2021; Soini et al., 2021), teacher autonomy and professional orientation (Wermke & Salokangas, 2021; Nivanaho et al., 2024), marketisation dynamics (Kosunen et al., 2020; Seppänen et al., 2023), and the edu-business industry (Matson & Salokangas, 2025). Our theoretical claims about how mediated publicness emerges and is then hollowed out are supported by this empirical grounding from this secondary literature. We propose a heuristic framework comprising three interrelated elements: political-financial commitment to public need over consumer want; a steering framework that embodies public deliberation; and empowerment of the teaching profession to act as trusted mediator. We don't see these tensions as dialectical contradictions to be resolved, rather we see them as antinomies that must be institutionally sustained (or tensions kept open) if curriculum-making is to remain public. This heuristic allows analysis of how curriculum publicness is enacted, safeguarded, and undermined across European contexts facing analogous pressures and challenges.

Publicness emerges from a specific constitutional act: resources (financial, institutional and professional) are diverted from private circuits – where they would normally serve in the interests of familial advantage, sectional interests, or profit-seeking – and reoriented as the collective good dedicated to purposes that go beyond individual choice. Professional mediation works within this framework – not as straightforward implementation of public preferences, but as trusted judgement exercised on behalf of collective purposes using collectively mobilised and dedicated resources. The Finnish public education system represents a compelling case of mediated publicness. The system started to acquire elements of publicness not when it involved direct participation but when it was restructured around collective responsibility and public resourcing. The confluence of the Finnish Bildung tradition, comprehensive reform, and trust-based devolution gave rise to institutional conditions for collective curriculum responsibility. Commodification threatens to collapse the life-sustaining tensions underpinning curriculum publicness. Bildung's insularity – political quietism and withdrawal from worldly concerns – left it exposed, now compelled to justify its relevance under those exact terms it had historically rejected. Competency frameworks occupy the semantic space once held by Bildung's humanistic aspirations, and have gradually embedded economic rationalities that recast self-formation as psychologised, ablist productive capacity. The process of commodification represents the collapse of a fundamental relationship. A healthy public system sustains the productive tension that the school exists for the child and parents, and that the child and parents exist for the school. We fear its disappearance signals the collapse of the very time in which education could still be public.

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