This paper considers the functions and effects of "representation" in politics and education. The voting age for public elections in Japan has been lowered from 20 or older to 18 or older, calling for a shift in the curriculum to the basics of political participation and competence. In this paper, while focusing on the political issues concerning the publicness of the curriculum up until now in particular, I will demonstrate experimentally that considering this problem means radically reconsidering the struggles contained in the meaning of participatory politics itself, not only the situation of representative democracy in modern society, and that it clarifies once again the covertly configured educational problems of competency. [Translated by Nadezhda Murray. This article was originally published, in Japanese, in "The Japanese Journal of Educational Research" v82 n4 2015.]