The terms democracy and the pedagogy of the possible name an approach imagining schools as sites where more just, inclusive and participatory collective life can be practised, particularly in early childhood. The entry brings three traditions into dialogue. (a) Critical pedagogy, particularly in its post-structuralist, Foucauldian, and post-Marxist readings, engages with Rancièrian critiques of pedagogical mastery and offers a vocabulary for examining how power, knowledge, subjectivity, and hegemony are produced and contested within educational life. (b) Freinet pedagogy, extended through Fernand Oury’s Institutional Pedagogy, contributes a politically grounded, practice-first repertoire of cooperative techniques, classroom institutions, and democratic forms of organisation. (c) Educational commons approaches frame knowledge, space, time, and pedagogical relations as shared goods, collectively produced, cared for, and democratically governed by a community of teachers, children, and families. In this perspective, the child is approached as a commoner and agent in the here and now. The educator, in turn, is understood as a fellow commoner and reflexive practitioner, capable of acting beyond the logics of both the state and the market. Together, they co-shape the everyday life of education. Eight shared dimensions, namely the relational, the political, praxis, agency, anti-enclosure, prefiguration, community, and the schoolized mind, traverse all three traditions, with care as their transversal thread. The framework is conceived as a hospitable theoretical and practical space, not as a self-contained doctrine. It is heuristic in orientation, bringing these traditions into conversation because each contributes a complementary layer to democratic educational life.
Contemporary early childhood education operates under intensifying pressures, including the standardisation of developmental outcomes, the marketisation of care and learning, and the expansion of audit-based quality assurance systems. These systems have been criticised for reducing the richness of early childhood experience to measurable and comparable indicators
[1]. These pressures coexist with persistent social inequalities, exclusion, and discrimination that shape children’s lives from the earliest years. In this context, revisiting critical educational traditions can help clarify how more socially just, inclusive, and participatory educational environments may be conceptualised and practised.
Three such traditions, namely critical pedagogy, Freinet pedagogy, and the educational commons, developed in distinct historical and intellectual contexts, converge around a shared aspiration to transform educational spaces into sites of participation, critical inquiry, and collective agency. The entry does not offer an exhaustive genealogy of each tradition. Instead, it situates them historically and conceptually in order to read them relationally, with attention to their points of convergence, internal tensions, and implications for early childhood education and the preparation of early childhood educators. These traditions are not identical. They are brought together because each contributes a different layer to democratic educational practice. Critical pedagogy offers an analysis of power, knowledge, subjectivity, and inequality. Freinet pedagogy offers a historically tested repertoire of cooperative classroom practices. Educational commons approaches provide a contemporary framework for collective governance, shared resources, and democratic self-organisation.
Their convergence is therefore best understood as heuristic, not doctrinal. A concept that recurs throughout the entry, and that the three traditions illuminate from different angles, is the “schoolized mind”
[2]. The term is used here as an analytic shorthand, not as a fully established theoretical category. It refers to a historically formed configuration of dispositions through which the dominant grammar of conventional schooling is internalised, normalised, and reproduced in everyday educational life. This grammar includes temporal routines, spatial divisions, hierarchies of authority, assessment expectations, and assumptions about legitimate knowledge, as well as expectations about who is authorised to know, teach, speak, or decide.
Understood in this way, the schoolized mind is not a matter of false consciousness. It is better approached as an effect of normalisation and institutional subjectification, through which particular ways of being a teacher, a child, or a family member in relation to schooling come to appear natural and inevitable. The concept is related to, but not identical with, established discussions of the hidden curriculum, the grammar of schooling, habitus, normalisation, and Freire’s critique of the bureaucratisation of the mind. It also helps name why participatory reforms may coexist with persistent expectations of authority, compliance, proper conduct and adult control. It therefore functions as a connecting lens for examining how critical pedagogy, Freinet pedagogy, and educational commons each respond to the sedimented habits of conventional schooling.
This entry is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper 10.3390/encyclopedia6060132
