In our contribution, we discuss results from a research project that combines empirical methodologies with philosophical work to investigate how the current evolution towards learning environments is transforming traditional educational institutions (family, school, university). The project examines the broader implications of the tendency to address individual actors (lecturers, teachers, parents, students, youngsters) as learners and collective life in terms of (professional) learning/learner communities. Particularly we investigate how this evolution affects the kind of „gathering‟ or „association‟ that is staged and configured within these sites and how this affects their public character. Our assumption is that a clarification of the public character can contribute to the elaboration of an educational theory for the learning society. Based on preliminary explorations of the gatherings to be found in contexts of families, schools and universities, we hypothesize that at the level of the gathering learning practices can be distinguished from educational practices, with „domestic‟ and „public‟ being the defining features. It is important to explore to what extent educational gathering differ according to context and to clarify how political gatherings are distinct from educational gatherings: both include the act of making things public and of gathering a public, but in a different way.