Modern European cities are centres of cultural development, attracting people from all over the world, but they are also networked in unprecedented ways and partly decentred by this. Conceptions of the city and of education are mutually dependent, and the expression of this in terms of the creation of the polis has been familiar since Plato. On a certain reading, the good city is then teleologically congruent with good education as carefully designed, planned, and controlled. It will be our concern to show that another reading is possible. We shall do this with broad reference to (i) changes in technology, but highlighting examples relating to (ii) new constructions of fear in the lives of teenagers, and (iii) the togetherness of strangers in a street parade.

Hence, we ask: How are we to rethink of the polis, mediated and compromised by new technology as never before, as an orientation for education? New technology alters the experience of those on the inside of society and those at its margins alike. Opening new possibilities of interactivity but simultaneously providing virtual worlds into which we can withdraw, it reconstructs the forms of the public.

“Zero tolerance” has entered a new lexicon of urban safe places, coinciding with a rhetoric of inclusion that legislates its terms in unprecedented ways. Similarly, no-touch policies regulate institutional relationships between adults and children. The teacher is given safe operating procedures: follow the curriculum, ensure your students pass the tests, check that your class is ahead of the rest, and all will be well. But compliance with standard procedure drives underground the inherent risk in teaching, which Plato understood well. It stimulates fear in new ways, for what if now, in this culture of safe techniques, the teacher is to fail? And students who find themselves inscribed by the terms of audit and assessment find new ways to make themselves unreadable (or to become legible in new codes).

But what is this safe city that is being constructed? Lyotard’s dystopian vision of the “megalopolis” depicts a world where people no longer live in a place but a series of functional zones (shopping malls, factory estates, “gated communities”), extending from Los Angeles to Berlin and Taipei. . . This tranquilized condition is the fulfilment of Nietzsche’s Last Man, who desires only order, comfort, and ease. The agora is then either usurped by the animated participation of the responsible consumer or lost in pathological forms of social withdrawal.

The vocabulary of safe procedures and audit is but one facet of a new educational semiotics, which finds its parallels in the iconography of the city, from its websites to its street signage to its public parades. Our discussion examines the force of the exclusions this effects. But we relate these matters not only to the semiological force of new technology but to Plato’s vision of the polis as, in the end, a “city of words” to ask the question: how, in other words, can the citizen become apolis, in new forms of exposition?