ABSTRACT
The central premise of this chapter is that public education has broken down under the weight of economic and political forces of privatization (see also Baez, 2004). I argue that public schools do not operate as public spaces. Instead, they are privatized markets that reinforce commercialism and work-force preparation under the guise of public schooling. I question, therefore, the distinction between the public and private in education, as such a distinction seems more ideological than material. That is, while evidence indicates that public schools pursue private economic interests as aggressively as private entities, the commonly-held belief that they serve a public good allows private economic interests of a few to masquerade as the public interests of all. The effect of this masquerade is what I call consumer materialism, and it is frequently seen in the form of school-business partnerships, commercialism, and the consumerist language of business used to talk about schooling. My claim is that the private sphere dominates what the public one traditionally represented in theory (if not practice) and that the insistence on the private/public distinction actually obscures this domination and ensures its continuation.
