Pedagogic rights, public education and democracy

Abstract

In this paper, the argument that we make is that public education emerges from when democracy is put into practice in education. For the purposes of this paper we use pedagogic rights as proposed by Basil Bernstein as a way to frame and support this ‘putting into practice’. Democracy, we argue, has to be practiced in two senses: 1) it does not ‘exist’ but has to be continually renewed and brought to life between people, as such it is precarious and fleeting; 2) one might become better at democracy by trying to ‘do it’ more often and that education is where this ‘trying’ might occur. We draw on Rancière’s work on democracy that focusses on democratic acts or moments; on the ‘fracturing’ of sense (what is sayable, seeable, thinkable) – when people whose only part (including in education) is none, take one. A process of ‘becoming public’, we suggest, is instituted in these events. To this end, our proposal for public education is adversarial to contemporary formations of education. Conceptualising public education in this way shows that it is rare, and becoming rarer.