This article deals with the question of what has happened to ‘the public’ in the Swedish education system during the last three decades. In our search for an answer we illuminate and discuss how the process of marketisation, together with the learnification and individualisation of education, replaced ‘the public’ from public education with the logic of the market place. To shed some further light on the current discourse on Swedish education, we contrast two principles in education and teaching, the aristocratic principle and the democratic principle. According to the aristocratic principle, education is about fixating and reproducing existing power relations as the cornerstone of a well-ordered society. According to the democratic principle of education, equality is the cornerstone of a well-ordered democratic society. Considering the shift in the very infrastructure of the Swedish educational system, we arrive at the conclusion that the principles in education and teaching are characterised by the aristocratic principle, rather than those we have characterised as democratic principles. The educational message is clear: upcoming generations are to accept the rules of the market economy and play the game accordingly.

How is it possible that bullying continues to be a common phenomenon in schools, despite the fact that so many teachers, students and parents, through diverse anti-bullying programs, have been engaged in trying to stop it? This question is addressed in this article through a philosophy of education-based analysis of the phenomenon of bullying. The article builds on results from two research projects financed by the Swedish Research Council, and offers a critical reading of the so-called norm-critical (Swedish normkritiska) approaches to bullying. As a result of the analysis made, the article shows how the inequality of the institution itself reproduces the conditions for bullying, and that in order to change those conditions, individual actors in the everyday life of schooling need to confirm their equality.

In this article we explore some consequences of present day obsession with “learning” and how such obsession seems to make perfect sense for an education exclusively aiming at making a living in a neo-liberal economy. Instead of celebrating the economical aspects of learning, we highlight the importance of building democratic capacities in an ever changing world by taking education back to the public. The perspectives offered in this article are to be considered as theoretical and critical contributions to the discussion about current educational circumstances, in which discourses of learning seem to dominate the entire field of education.

The article explores some of the underlying factors leading to a toning down, and in some instances total exclusion, of the concept of teaching in the broader educational discourse, which as a result is alienating teachers as well as educational research with such foci. Therefore, what is argued in this article is that there is a need to re-invent teaching as a liberating force of education. The importance of teaching, we suggest, is that as a concept and practice it opens up for emancipation and change, while learning as it currently appears in educational discourse hinders both. We conclude the article by suggesting two important tasks ahead in order to re-invent teaching as a liberating force in education.