744 EDUCATIONAL THEORY Volume 67 Number 6 2017 What Is a Public Education and Why We Need It: A Philosophical Inquiry into Self-Development, Cultural Commitment, and Public Engagement Walter Feinberg Lexington Books, 2016, Pp. 164. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms. – John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems 1 [M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized skilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the last forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. – Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country 2 We began to write this review in late November 2016, when Dewey’s idea that public re-formation requires breaking existing political forms seemed an apt characterization of the process of current American politics, and Rorty’s forecast of the particular re-formation this process would take appeared painfully precise. Serious analysis as well as cultural kibitzing in the wake of that year’s U.S. presidential election have tried to explain disturbing changes in public discourse and action by alluding to a failure of public education to generate and maintain any shared sense of the standards and processes necessary to think systematically about normative conduct and truth claims. Yet, despite the deep concern about the education or miseducation of the public, there has been almost no focused debate about schooling. The irony here is understandable. American educational discourse and scholar- ship over at least the last forty years have buried debates about public education in the school-centric and technicist language of markets, competition, testing, man- agement, “leadership,” career preparation, finance, and the snake-oil medicine of “value-added” formulas. It is not that these issues are somehow separate from larger questions about public education, such as the following: To whom do schools answer regarding student outcomes in cognitive ability, cultural literacy, job readi- ness, critical thinking, and civic conduct? How and in what ways are schools responsible to parents, students, taxpayers, and a panoply of other constituencies? What are the goals and appropriate outcomes for a public education, how are they defined, and who defines them? Rather, the professional failure to link particular academic analyses to larger questions of mission, purpose, and aims has had dev- astating consequences for both educational theory and school practice. In Kansas,