Public Education and the Public Space

are continually reminded that we can no longer assume the existence of a consensus where the purposes of public education are concerned; nor can we assume consensus when it comes to professional expertise. It is obvious that faith in the promise of public schools has eroded, along with confidence in what they can offer to the young. We are all aware of a cacophony of demands, most of them focusing on individual achievement and on an assumed connection between achievement and mobility, acceptable performance and success. We hear special interest groups expressing multiple discontents, calling for new kinds of conformity, or for acquiescence to parochial ideals. We see people in their enclaves, people breaking off from what John Donne called "the Continent," refusing to be "part of the maine." (Thinking of the fundamentalists and the creationists and the bookburners and the segregationists, we might well ask ourselves: "For whom does the bell toll?") Most significantly, however, there is little talk today about the connection between public education and freedom, or about the ways in which schools might prevent what Thomas Jefferson called "a perversion into tyranny." Yet t is is a time when what we think of as civilization is being ripped apart across the planet by terror, torture, and totalitarian controls. It is a moment when we are instructed daily in the fragility of human rights, in the tenuousness of both freedom and democracy. To speak of freedom is in no sense to speak of separation from the many, from the "maine." Freedom is an achievement within concrete situations, an achievement by human beings involved in the world and with others. To speak of it is to speak, as John Dewey (1928) did of "something which comes to be, (of) a certain kind of growth" (p. 280). It is to hold in mind the human capacity to orient the self to the possible, to posit alternatives, to look at things as if they could be otherwise. The opposite of freedom is a type of alienation; it is stasis, petrifaction, fixity. It would seem to me that educators, on principle, would want to take a stand against what threatens our way of being in the world; yet the matter seldom enters educational discourse today. And with rare exceptions, nor does ny notion of the social good. We protest, of course, the withholding of funds from remedial programs and school lunch programs; we work to maintain support for res arch intended to improve what happens in our schools. Now and then someone comments on the link between effective schooling and national defense or industrial productivity; literacy is talked of as if it were part of the gross national product. Almost never is there an expressed concern about the public realm; there is silence about renewing the common world and about what that common world should be. What is it that lies in between, that holds us together, that we can cherish and try to keep alive? Where, when we ponder it, are we to turn? Questions like these move me to explore the role that might be played by public education in bringing into being an authentic public space, one that might give rise to a significant common world. I believe that our fundamental difficulties spring from what Dewey (1927) once called "the eclipse of the public" (p. 137). In The Public and its Problems, he This paper was the Presidential Address at the AERA Annual Meeting, New York City, March 1982.