This paper provides a reinterpretation of Paulo Freire's philosophy of hope and suggests that this interpretation may function as a fruitful ground for democratic education that aims to contest the prevailing neoliberal 'common sense'. The paper defines hope as a democratic virtue required for resisting the discursive practises and affective mechanisms associated with the contemporary neoliberal ethos-those, which Carlos Alberto Torres characterizes as the "neoliberal common sense" and Lauren Berlant as "cruel optimism". Conclusively, the paper constructs three principles for democratic education-´history as possibility´, ´the ethics of intervention´, and ´democratization'-which are intended to function as a foundation for democratic education through which the virtue of hope can be fostered. These principles are argued to form a basis for reviving the political dimensions of education and thus allowing collective transformative action.

This essay is about the ethos of vulnerability, young people, and policies and practices related to youth support systems in Finland. Our aim is to scrutinize the alliance of the ethos of vulnerability and neoliberal rationality as well as its outcomes in terms of support systems and young people from various backgrounds. In the end, we take our analysis further to see how this alliance is associated with education and how it works by de-politicising, narrowing, and individualizing education toward a new kind of highly tailored precision education governance.