This volume is the first in a set of two to be published as the National Society for the Study of Education (NSSE) yearbook for 2008. Planning for the volumes began more than five years ago, when the Society's Board of Directors expressed an interest in taking steps to encourage a more expansive, robust, and inclusive dialogue about education in democratic societies. Many of the Society's previous yearbooks have been remarkably accessible to lay audiences, but focused on particular specialties or topics within the field of professional education. The Board wondered whether it would be possible to prepare a set of books that would appeal to a broad cross-section of readers, ranging from school teachers to school board members, from parents to policymakers, from journalists to jurists. These ruminations eventually resolved into an exploration of the foundational reasons for education and its essential importance in democratic nations. Hence the main title for both volumes, "Why Do We Educate?" This first volume carries the subtitle "Renewing the Conversation", while the second volume is subtitled "Voices from the Conversation". Volume I is an invitation to all who are interested in education to enter the dialogue about its purposes and its processes. It is intended to serve as a kind of handbook for those who enter the conversation, or who have been part of it for some time. The essays in this volume are designed to open pathways of inquiry into the foundational purposes of education in democratic societies. They are designed to assist, to provoke, and to advance the vitally important discourse about education. (Contains 365 notes.)