ABSTRACT
A cursory look at many public schools illuminates as much about their woeful “failings” as it does the erosion of public culture with the rise of the market society’s national security state. Our public culture, after all, sets the limits, imagines the possibilities, and rhetorically and materially commits to-or withdraws commitment from-public schools and the youth they serve, meaning that public schools reflect the society’s ethical and civic commitments to current and future generations.3 This holds true today no less than in Horace Mann’s time when he imagined the common school as the “balance-wheel of the social machinery,” the producer of literate citizens and a common political culture that would provide a bulwark against the erosion of the republic.4 We clearly live in different times. Having made public schools one of the principal targets in a social class war on public goods since the Reagan administrations, the U.S. transformed children and youth from being symbols of the future, a status ascribed to them during most of the twentieth century, into collateral casualties. While youth-even the concept of youth-could not but be collateral casualties of the war waged on essential institutions that serve them, it seems that some youth have recently become direct targets, inner demons to be fought, and fought again. With these redefined statuses, youth experience new and intensified forms of social control, raising questions about contemporary commitments to both youth and democracy.
