for a return to and renewal of the public functions and foundations of education is welcome and needed. We live in a time when the dominant &dquo;public philosophy&dquo; (Wolin, 1981) is in reality a legitimation for an assault on the idea of a public, the committed democratic citizen, and the idea of education as a civic enterprise. Professor Butts makes this call concrete by directing teacher education programs to move beyond the training of teachers to the preparation of public educators.In this context, I would like to discuss a crucial distinction between the &dquo;state&dquo; and &dquo;public.&dquo; An examination of this distinction, I believe, will generate alternative understandings of what we mean by democracy and citizenship, and provide a more theoretically precise and politically hard-headed perspective on the problems we face in preparing teachers to be public educators.In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey writes that inherited political agencies &dquo;obstruct the organization of the new public. They prevent that development of new forms of the state which might grow up rapidly were social life more fluid, less precipitated into set political and legal molds. To form itself, the public has to break existing political forms&dquo; (p. 31, emphasis added). Dewey continues, By its very nature, a state is ever something to be scrutinized, investigated, searched for. Almost as soon as its form is stabilized, it needs to be remade. Thus the problem of discovering the state is not a problem for theoretical inquirers engaged solely in surveying institutions which already exist. It is a practical problem of human beings living in association with one another, of mankind generically. (pp. 31-32) Educators must be prepared to conceive of educational problems in public terms and confront the state where necessary, not as troublemakers or agitators acting on their own ideological or personal agendas, but as responsible citizens acting on their civic purpose -the formation of new publics.In short, the public is not the state and the commensurability of the state's interest and the public good must be seen as problematic. Indeed, for Dewey, for new publics to be formed which nurture and extend civic virtues and democratic social relations, existing political forms must be broken and remade in response to practical problems of ongoing social life. More importantly, public education expresses the idea of something to be formed (a public) through communicative practices in which all can participate and to which they can contribute. It is here that Dewey's distinction between the public and the state becomes significant by engendering alternative understandings of democracy and citizenship. These, in turn, provide the foundations for an alternative conception of the civic education of teachers.When the public is identified with the state and democracy is defined in reference to a form of government, the task of democracy becomes one of preserving and defending the state. This perverts the democratic sense ...