Review of What Is A Public Education and Why We Need It: A Philosophical Inquiry into Self-Development, Cultural Commitment, and Public Engagement, Walter Feinberg

Abstract

According to Feinberg, public education is needed “to renew a public by providing the young with the skills, dispositions, and perspectives required to engage with strangers about their shared interests and common fate and to contribute to shaping it” (134). The chief obstacles to this that he identifies are parents sending their children “to schools that replicate their own ideas and social class positions” (p.1), these, he contends, are “not good for democracy” (1). For Feinberg, a public is an intergenerational unity made up of strangers who engage with one another about their shared interests and common fate. Part of his book’s purpose is to defend the existence of a public, which ought to be cultivated, rather than allowed to atrophy.