OEWeek 2026 is just around the corner and I will be presenting the session

Open Education as Anti-Fascism: Building Democratic Resilience

It is a continuation from the OECamp Global last November, where I also talked about the issues of techno-authoritarianism and the potential role of Open Education in the ongoing attack of universities and the undermining of democracy. I also published the slides and a blogpost.

There are a few updates with regard to the central arguments of my blogpost.

Open Washing

The persistence of openwashing is not merely a rhetorical problem — it reflects a structural one. In a soon to be published paper (Preprint) Bence Lukács and I argue that the OER movement has consistently addressed two of the three levels identified in Geels‘ Multi-Level Perspective framework: the landscape (global policy declarations, UNESCO recommendations, universal values) and the niche (funded projects, grassroots initiatives, experimental pedagogies). What has been systematically neglected is the regime level, i.e., the dominant institutions, publishing infrastructures, platform monopolies and licensing standards that stabilize the educational status quo. Symbolic reforms, including initiatives like „Opening up Education“ or CC Signals, have attempted to address the regime, but without legally binding enforcement or structural change. The result is a persistent disconnection: landscape aspirations and niche innovations exist in isolation from the institutional logics that govern daily teaching practice. This is why openwashing works: it operates precisely at the regime level, appropriating the language of the landscape without touching the power structures below.

What can we do about it?

To think through this more carefully, I have written a background paper, Re-telling the Story of OER: From Pragmatic Success to Ideological Crisis, which diagnoses the structural vulnerability of Open Education in the absence of ideological grounding. The paper identifies three guiding questions for a structured debate: Which philosophical foundations of Open Education remain viable, and which require revision? How can Open Education develop counter-narratives to techno-authoritarian ideologies? And how can the concept of Bildung serve as a philosophical resource for re-grounding Open Education?

From Bildung to the Dark Enlightenment

The vulnerability of Bildung to its dark inversion is not only a philosophical possibility, it has been materially prepared. The promise of Bildung as the guiding principle of the modern university has been hollowed out by the very social conditions in which universities operate. Under capitalism, the emancipatory promise of education, i.e., that knowledge enables self-formation and social mobility has been progressively decoupled from reality. The expansion of higher education produced not liberation but debt. The university became an instrument of credentialing and selection rather than of Bildung in any meaningful sense. This legitimacy crisis did not go unnoticed by the right. J.D. Vance, speaking at the National Conservatism Conference in 2021, invoked Nixon’s formula directly: „The professors are the enemy.“ What makes this attack so effective is that it instrumentalizes a frustration that is structurally grounded. Vance speaks at length about student debt and broken promises before he turns to the assault. The target is real and his diagnosis is cynically misdirected. This is precisely what makes techno-authoritarian attacks on universities so difficult to counter with institutional defences alone: the institutions have already lost the moral authority that Bildung once conferred on them.

The session at OE Week 2026 picks up these threads. If you want to join the conversation either in person on March 4th or in the comments below, you are very welcome.

Categories: Open Education

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