At the centre of this paper is the distinction between a politicised school, and school as a political space. We take note of Papastephanou’s (2005) warning not to make education the passive receiver of political thought. Based on Masschelein and Simons (2013), we criticise the tendency to conceptualise democratic education, particularly agonistic democratic education, as the implementation of political theory in a school context. We draw on their idea of school as free time, to argue that democratic education should envision the classroom as political in itself, that is, as a place for negotiation and renewal, where the ends are not predetermined. When school becomes a place to implement political theory, when it is politicised, then it is stripped of its own political potency. In scholastic terms, it is tamed. In this paper, a fusion of Mouffean agonism with Masschelein and Simons’ conception of school, works to form an understanding of agonistic democratic education as a time and place for the formation of community and for the negotiation of identity, under protection from the non-accountability (Arendt 1961) that characterises scholastic practice.
