In this article, the author analyzes public education, and whether America can survive without it. There is a deep sense in which the phrase "public education" is redundant: Education is public, above all in a democracy. To think of it any other way is to rob it of its essential meaning. For education is an essential public good addressed to young citizens-to-be as members of a community. Education not only speaks to the public, it is the means by which a public is forged. It is how individuals are transformed into responsible participants in the communities of the classroom, the neighborhood, the town, the nation and (in schools that recognize the new interdependence of our times) the world to which they belong.