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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.

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This paper explores what is private and what is public in young people’s learning of democracy. Private and public are sometimes used within the field of education and democracy as spatial concepts in which they are to represent different places such as the home and the school. What we intend to explore in this paper are three dimensions of the distinction between public and private as they come into being in a school. The dimensions are: physical spaces such as the classroom and the dining hall; mental spaces such as self-reflexivity and self-creation; and social spaces such as power and negotiation. Our intention is to use these dimensions as analytical tools in order to translate young people’s experiences of schooling into an understanding of what meanings private and public hold for their learning of democracy. Our empirical data is collected through observations and interviews with youth at a secondary compulsory school in the middle part of Sweden.