This paper uses Anderson's notion of 'imagined community' to argue that how people think about the publicness of their school system provides insight into the functioning and flourishing of communities, societies and nations. We focus on the privatisation of public schooling in Alberta, Canada and Northern England to highlight tensions between the provision of public schooling today and a romanticised, historical imagining of the public school providing equality and emancipation for all. We use data collected from 47 semi-structured interviews of education bureaucrats, union officials, school personnel and advocacy group members that asked about what constitutes 'publicness' within their system. Our analysis shows a tension between the realities of public systems opened up through market-oriented policies of 'autonomous' provision and stakeholders who still strongly believed in a public school system that was in the service of society, rather than the more individualist orientation of school choice and autonomy imaginaries.