Though they may have answers and insights, no one has asked them. So the usual coffee shop talk is about the stupidity of government, school, police, courts, and so forth. As a result, governance came to be understood as policymaking crafted by experts and professionals and generated outside of the role and everyday environments of citizens. This vacuum between ordinary people's lives and the practice of governance has been filled by other identities and practices more private in nature, less focused on serious public work and public problem solving. People's imagination and capacity to shape the world has been constricted, imprisoned in excessively narrow definitions of task and role.
Public work is a new freedom movement.
It offers a way for professionals to liberate their knowledge by helping to catalyze wide civic action around community problems. In this chapter, we looked at a general shift to a service-based society and its impact on public life. The next chapter considers more specifically our institutions and organizations and how they make decisions and take action in this environment. Liberal education, especially at land grant institutions, has from its beginning gone beyond academic inquiry and narrowly conceived professional training to prepare students for responsible citizenship in a practical vein. Citizenship, in this sense, conveys the sense of civic usefulness in public problem solving and contribution that founders such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin stressed as the very rationale for higher education.