ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to appropriate elements from the original common school movement along with elements from the new discourse on the commons to consider how different forms of public and private control over schooling produce the common or enclose it. Corporate school reform threatens the possibility for public schools to develop as places where knowledge, pedagogical authority, and experiences are taken up in relation to broader political, ethical, cultural, and material struggles informing competing claims to truth. The U.S. public school system has its origins in the common school movement spearheaded first in Massachusetts by Horace Mann in the early nineteenth century. While Mann's project includes the virtues of expanding universal and secular public education and expanding civic education for civic participation. Voucher schemes, homeschooling, and scholarship tax credits contribute to an effort by especially the Christian Right to capture public resources to pay for religious education.
