Early childhood/educational environmental imaginations transmit national, global and planetary views of the world through texts, visual representations and material objects. These representations produce politics, including nationalism and globalism, and play a part in policy making as well as in how children learn to view and relate to the world.…

Twenty years after the Lisbon strategy, education policy in the European Union (EU) is at a critical juncture, with a new set of strategic goals endorsed for the 2021-2030 decade. This article examines the complex interplay of ideas, institutions and actors, in articulating education policy priorities in the new European Education Area (EEA).…

The paper offers a pedagogical response to the complexity of sustainability challenges that takes the existential and emotional dimensions of climate change seriously. To this end, the paper unfolds in two parts. The first part makes a distinction between 'public pedagogy' as an area of educational scholarship and 'pedagogical publics' as a…

In recent years we have seen increasing youth activism on climate and other sustainability issues. This paper presents a theoretical framework for further research on young sustainability activists as public educators. The point of departure is taken in Latour's argumentation concerning the need to create new attachments to the Earth. In line with…

This article considers some theoretical resources for resistance to neoliberalised schooling and develops principles for reimagining the common school. Whilst relevant internationally, it is situated in the particular context of England, as a global epicentre of school reform -- a marketised and largely privatised system where the net of…

Global learning may be understood as an educational response to the development towards a world society. The development of world society is accompanied by a wide range of adaptation challenges, such as the development of global social justice, the overcoming of paternalism or the facilitation of social solidarity and dealing with migration in an…

Klaus Mollenhauer (1928-1998) is one of the most important German theorists of education in the postwar era. Mollenhauer is often remembered in Germany today for his first book titled "Education and Emancipation: Polemical Sketches," but he received international renown for his final monograph, "Forgotten Connections: On Culture and…

This article introduces the topic of the special issue, 'Public education at the crossroads', by pointing to some of the debates and controversies surrounding the topic of public education and by framing the theme, while explaining the context and some components of the educational systems of the countries under examination -- namely the USA and…

This article deals with the COVID-19 pandemic as a point of acceleration for the emergence of a distinctive and yet unstable problematization of the 20th-century school form. Focusing on the Italian public and policy debate on education and adopting an archaeological analytics, it explores what 'other' coordinates for the forms of schooling are…

This article presents introductory considerations on a sociological outside description of the educational system. After this particular form of a sociological perspective has been determined, which, unlike pedagogical research, does not necessarily depend on the fact that its observations in the educational system can be connected, this distanced…

The article presents two key concepts of sociological systems theory -- externalisation and structural coupling -- and applies them to explain (a) the exponential growth of international large-scale student assessments and (b) the rise of 'policy-relevant' educational research. The author concludes with a comparison between key concepts used in…

In his posthumously published work on education, Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998) described his approach to the sociological observation of the educational system as a formal one. Only by refraining from more substantial definitions, based on what teachers hope to convey, he claimed, can education be understood in all its historical and geographical…

This article analyses the trajectory of national testing in Portugal between the early 1990s and 2015 in order to unveil continuities and changes in the regulatory processes of education in Portugal, particularly the emergence of results-based coordination and control methods. Drawing on legislative materials, it identifies and describes the…

In this paper, we discuss the case of the recent introduction of a career guidance software within Italian schools with the aim to explore the use of digital devices in the governance of educational processes within the field of lifelong guidance. First, we provide a semiotic analysis of the software and its online platform with the aim of…

The focus of this article is the inter-relationship between two canonical notions in contemporary education discourse: 'reflective practice' and 'student satisfaction' in the context of the marketisation of higher education across Europe and the concomitant emphasis on student autonomy and institutional competitiveness. Drawing on the work of Jan…