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The Common Good as the Ongoing Conversation about Schooling

The Common Good, Page 2


The American founders, influenced in part by Cicero, were also keenly aware of the virtuous obligations and purposes needed to realize the common good:

The public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued. (Madison, Federalist Paper #45)

A government ought to contain in itself every power requisite to the full accomplishment of ...the public good and to the sense of the people. (Hamilton, Federalist Paper #31)

The aim of every political constitution is ... to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society (Madison, Federalist Paper #57)

But they were also aware of the threats, as these passages show:

The people commonly intend the public good. This often applies to their very errors. But... they [do not] always reason right about the means of promoting it. (Hamilton, Federalist Paper #71)

It may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people. (Madison, Federalist Paper #10)

These statements show the connection in the minds of the founders to thinking well and therefore to public schooling. In the first of these two passages, concern is that citizens reason better about the common good, and in the second, that via the capacity to think well they might protect the common good from bias, intrigue, and corruption. These threats are always present, as they are today, and only reason and good thinking can foil their purposes.

In this light, public schooling absolutely requires the ongoing conversation about the common good. And that requirement includes conversation about the purposes of public schooling. Without it, public schooling, too, would crumble away.

Obviously, in Ohio’s local schools and districts of the present day, this conversation about schooling must include families and community members: lots of them. It should not be left to experts or even elected officials. It certainly cannot be a private conversation among professional educators only. Public schooling is principally of, for, and by the public. It may help people obtain good jobs, but this purpose is a by-product of thinking well on behalf of the common good.

And the conversation should, and will inevitably, include anything and everything that participants bring to the discussion: ideas about living well; ideas about truth; ideas about what is good or right; ideas about social justice; proposals for action and proposals for inaction. See the Table for some excerpts from this long and enduring conversation.

A people or republic is not any collection of human beings brought together in any sort of way, but an assemblage of people in large numbers associated in agreement with respect to justice and a partnership for the common good.
— Cicero

Belief in the “common man” is a familiar article in the democratic creed. That belief is without basis ... save as it means faith in the potentialities of ... every human being irrespective of race, color, sex, birth and family, of material or cultural wealth. This faith may be enacted in statutes, but it is only on paper unless it is put in force in the attitudes which human beings display to one another in all the incidents and relations of daily life
—John Dewey

I practice an engaged spirituality that is active within the world to help heal injustice, hatred, oppression, fear and violence with justice, loving-kindness, equanimity, courage and nonviolence, to not cooperate with common evil and bring about The Common Good.
— Mahatma Gandhi

This [i.e., solidarity] then is not a feeling of vague compassion or shallow distress at the misfortunes of so many people, both near and far. On the contrary, it is a firm and persevering determination to commit oneself to the common good; that is to say, to the good of all and of each individual, because we are all really responsible for all.
—St. John Paul II

Our shared values define us more than our differences. And acknowledging those shared values can see us through our challenges today if we have the wisdom to trust in them again.
— John McCain

It is difficult for the common good to prevail against the intense concentration of those who have a special interest, especially if the decisions are made behind locked doors.
— Jimmy Carter