In a year celebrating the centennial anniversary of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education , Walter Feinberg has published a book explaining and defending the public school’s crucial role in reproducing a civic public within each generation. This timing brings attention to the multiple ways the text owes debt to Deweyan notions of philosophy, conceptions of self, and the uniquely public aspects of public education, while still reflecting on contemporary dilemmas and challenges faced by the defenders of public educational structures. As Feinberg’s writings in educational philosophy have utilized varieties of political liberalism more than classical pragmatism, the Deweyan influences in the text are particularly noteworthy for those of us who closely follow his work. The text reviewed is most similar to the arguments in Common Schools/Uncommon Identities: National Unity and Cultural Difference (2000), but instead of focusing on citizenship education, the present text’s focus is broader and more ambitious. Feinberg’s argument in What Is a Public Education and Why We Need It connects with Deweyan philosophy beyond Democracy and Education , in particular such works as The School and Society and The Child and the Curriculum . Feinberg is writing here, like Dewey did at intervals throughout his career, for a wide audience: this is a short book working to convey a sophisticated argument in an accessible way. Far more succinctly than did Democracy and Education, Feinberg’s new book explains to lay readers why our society depends upon public education for its continuance as a democratic society. The argument unfolds from explorations of self-development in Chapter 1, to the role of self in culture, to the notion of cultural strangers so important to public spheres in Chapter 3. In Chapters 4 to 6, Feinberg turns towards values and the civic good, explaining how these are constructed and stabilized in public schools, and why this is critically and uniquely the work of public education.

As the mixed achievements of charter schools come under more intense political inspection, the conceptual underpinnings of current charter school reform remain largely unexamined. This article focuses on one moral-political concept centrally related to school reform and policy, the concept of justice. Using examples from the state of Ohio, the authors sketch two contrary concepts of justice, tracing their logical trajectory to varied empirical consequences as these relate to charter schooling policy. They contrast these two theories of justice as "libertarian justice" and "democratic justice." There is ample evidence to suggest that a libertarian sense of justice has pervasively shaped charter policies and minimal evidence to suggest the influence of a democratic sense of justice, based on principles of both recognition and redistribution. The full democratic potential of charter schooling reform cannot be achieved without a democratic conception of justice driving its policies and goals.

Background Parental beliefs about child problem behaviour have emerged as closely related to referral intentions to mental health services.Methods This study compared beliefs of severity, impact and advice seeking for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) behaviours of parents whose preschool children present ADHD behaviours with those of parents whose children do not display such behaviours. Both parents of 295 preschoolers, aged 4-6 years, enrolled in kindergartens in Athens, filled in: (i) a questionnaire composed by a vignette describing a hypothetical 5-year-old child presenting ADHD symptoms followed by rating scales assessing dimensions of severity, impact and referral intention, and (ii) the 'Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire' for screening ADHD behaviours in their own child.Results Results showed that almost half of the parents who reported ADHD behaviours in their own child replied that they had never met a child exhibiting such behaviours. These parents also perceived such behaviours as being less severe and with less negative family impact than parents who did not report such behaviours in their own child.Conclusions Parents whose preschool child displays ADHD behaviours tend to perceive them as normal developmental patterns and may suspend the referral of the child. Implications of these findings for early identification of ADHD are discussed.