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This chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book presents a new conceptualisation, so-called Knowledgeable Polities, and identifies and deploys the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity as the methodological means of examining the dynamics of the state, people, practices, ideologies and networks. Such an approach allows the study to consider the conditions for rethinking politically ongoing ‘reforms’ of education. The book provides access to ideas, evidence, and practices vital for the re-politicisation of public services education. By engaging with Hannah Arendt as a ‘discussion partner’, it explores a range of ideas and arguments.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The chapter recaps that the book used Hannah Arendt's thinking to explore the catastrophe that is unfolding in plain sight in public services education and the wider political culture in which it is located. The investigation into education policy reveals the ‘new modes of negating the human’ through the disposability of children and the professionals committed to educating them. The chapter begins by summarising what is unfolding and testing it against the conditions for totalitarianism that Arendt identifies. It notes the trends in the crystallisation of those conditions, and the dangers evident in the death of political thinking, talking, and action. A study of public services education is a site where this can be recognised, but it is also where politics is in evidence in regard to both resistance and the resilience of a commons approach.

This chapter suggests that complex forms of discrimination are developing within and external to schools: within-school segregation is happening through the use of data to determine particular curriculum pathways and ability grouping of children; between-schools segregation through the use of data to determine high-status academic schools in comparison with ‘sink’ schools; and beyond schools, where children are separating themselves from school through absence and parents are making proactive decisions to home school. The chapter examines the construction of this fragmented and chaotic ‘system’ by considering the possibilities for reconciliation through examining Hannah Arendt's work on forgiving. The deployment of the Education Policy Knowledgeable Polity to the reforms to public services commons education puts the focus on a form of depoliticisation by privatism where the opportunity and capacity for forgiveness is in peril.

This chapter traces the evolution of graduate level public affairs education in the United States in terms of focus, mission, curriculum, institutional locus, and enrollments, with attention to similarities and differences at the masters and doctoral levels. It highlights the role of two key professional associations in the evolution of the field, NASPAA and APPAM. It also examines some persistent challenges regarding how broadly or narrowly to define the field, how clearly to differentiate among the related fields of study, and how to define and ensure quality.