Abstract

This paper revisits and expands upon previous reflections on the ideological construction of education as a repository of postponed fantasies. By deepening the psychoanalytic framework of das Ding (Freud) and objet petit a (Lacan), the analysis explores how educational ideals—such as equality, inclusion, emancipation, and democracy—often operate as ideological signifiers sustaining an unattainable fantasy of transformation. Drawing on Žižek’s and Rancière’s critiques, the argument situates education within the symbolic order of late capitalism, revealing how its emancipatory discourse is simultaneously upheld and neutralized by the same ideological structures it seeks to contest. Through historical references to the New Education Movement and its humanistic aspirations, the paper highlights the paradoxical endurance of “good intentions” as mechanisms of self-deception. The persistence of belief in education’s salvific role is interpreted as a symptom of a collective denial akin to the first stage of grief—maintained by the enjoyment derived from ideological participation itself. Against this backdrop, the article calls for a renewed critical stance that neither succumbs to nihilism nor to naïve optimism. Instead, it argues for an ethos of lucidity, grounded in post-critical pedagogy, that preserves the ethical demand for hope without fetishizing it. This re-engagement with the ideological unconscious of education aims to recover the transformative potential of critique as a form of philosophical and pedagogical vigilance toward the present.