Abstract
Public, as a topic, is a rich ground for debate regarding its meaning and location. Guiding questions pertaining to public range from and combine the existential, is there a public? To the aesthetic, what does a public look like? To the historical, when was there a public? To the moral, what should a public be? I enter and focus this debate on the uses and difficulties of public as it pertains to public education. Specifically, what follows for education when different theories of the public are attached to it? And, alternately, in what ways is the public currently defined by federal education policy in the US? In asking these questions, I am limiting my focus to three main claims: 1) the public schools as understood and controlled by federal government policy maintain a neo-liberal stance that fashions public schools as a part of the free market; 2) the recent uptake of Hannah Arendt’s theory of the public as framing public schools differently from the dominant policy discourse serves to reinscribe schools in a narrative of decline already claiming the public schools are failing; and 3) Jürgen Habermas offers a theory of the public that, understood heuristically, places the public of public education in a dialectical, rather than a fatal, narrative.