Education has been practised and conceptualised internationally in ways that demonstrate its increasing privatisation, enabled through a dependency on numerical data and an adherence to a social world that is constructed and distorted through these numbers. We argue that Covid-19 signifies, first, the catastrophic failure or irrelevance of the technologies of privatisation to addressing the pandemic’s exigencies and implications, and, second, the necessity of a public form of education to address the post-pandemic landscape. We do this through showing how five strong claims associated with contemporary education policy and practice have been revealed by Covid-19 to be myths, whose maintenance is a luxury made possible only in relatively stable times, and even then only through hard policy work made invisible through now demonstrably false claims that There Is No Alternative.