This book analyses educational theory in order to offer an alternative view of the history of education in modernity. It provides a new understanding of education as a phenomenon that draws on powerful lines of thinking, but also makes a significant departure from the conventional wisdom of both education policy and education studies. These perspectives offer an original and challenging account of what education is and of what politics has become, providing resources to rethink education as a fundamental dimension of the unprecedented political order of our time. It does this through a focus on what it takes to be the key, complex and expanding political apparatus of education. Taking the school to be the paradigm institution of modernity and beyond, the book proposes that we see the school as central to contemporary political ontology.