Can education liberate us? Reframing an old question

Abstract This article reframes the question ‘Can education liberate us?’ by shifting attention from education’s capacity to produce emancipated individuals to its capacity to enable—or foreclose—liberation within the experience of subjectivation. Instead of proposing new educational theory or conducting empirical research, it examines how normative frameworks in educational discourse limit possibilities for thinking about freedom and self-relation. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s and Michel Foucault’s respective critiques, the article argues that liberation must target not just the individual, but the very experience by which one comes to recognize oneself as an educational subject. Through critical analysis of Paulo Freire, critical pedagogy traditions, and Gert J. J. Biesta’s vision of democratic education, it shows that the most explicitly critical approaches operate within normative frameworks that presuppose specific forms of subjectivity, and predetermine what liberation means. As a counterpoint, the article returns to Plato’s paideia, reinterpreting it through Foucault’s ‘technologies of the self’, and Heidegger’s analysis of the Cave Allegory. This reinterpretation considers whether education might function not as formation, but as a practice of freedom—one that frees the relation to self from normative constraints.