Thomas Jefferson, who knew most things, knew exactly why Americans should be educated. The founder of a university and the namesake of a hundred high schools, he carefully explained his bill "to diffuse knowledge more generally through the mass of the people."

"Of the views of this law," he wrote, "none is more important, none more legitimate, than of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty... History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future... And to render even them safe, their minds must be improved in a certain degree."

So the question is how, starting from that approach, did we get to a pile of handouts outside a Portland first-grade class headed, "What Employers Want"?

Jefferson, like a wide stream of scholastic thinkers from Plato to Big Bird, had a basic educational goal of producing citizens - people to help steer their society.

By contrast, the most desperately advanced educational goal of our time is to produce taxpayers - people who won't have to be supported by the society.

Instead of viewing American children with a hopeful parent's gaze, we now fix them with the bleak eye of a potential father-in-law - asking primarily if they will ever be employed. That question is now the overriding one we put to our public school system.

"Education isn't just a social concern, it's a major economic issue," an IBM chairman proclaimed in a full-page ad in The New York Times Magazine, generously upgrading the subject to real significance. "If our students can't compete today, how will our companies compete tomorrow?"

It's a perfectly good question - although it does rather give the students second billing. But it's not clear that it should be the only question, or even the first.

In fact, our entire conversation about education is full of revealing language, showing and shaping the ways we think about our schools. A century ago, Sherlock Holmes praised Victorian schools - presumably after careful analysis of the evidence - as "Lighthouses! Beacons of the future! Capsules, with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wiser, better England of the future." It's a language that would have echoed through most of the 20th century in America, but has been lost in the last decades. Now, public schools are as likely to be described, as one letter to the editor did recently, as "the last bastions of bureaucratic socialism," by people surprised that the schools didn't disappear when the Soviet Union collapsed. Public schools are assumed to be in desperate shape, failing even in their most basic role - as a subsidiary of our economic development efforts.

And the way we now talk about schools helps create the way we think about them. "We need a language of schooling," wrote UCLA Professor Mike Rose recently, "that, in addition to economy, offers a vocabulary of respect, decency, esthetics, joy, courage, intellect, civility, heart and mind, skill and understanding. For that matter, think of how rarely we hear of a commitment to public education as the center of a free society."

Actually, that was where we started - a couple of hundred years ago.

American society now has fewer and fewer centers, arenas where different people have common experiences. The draft is gone. All those World War II movies with the platoon that somehow included the Southerner, the big Irishman, Goldberg from Brooklyn and the Midwestern farm boy who always got killed first actually reflected a kind of military melting-pot experience. Libraries and playgrounds are steadily less prominent as public priorities and utilities, as people seek reading and recreation in more controlled circumstances. In most of America, downtowns as common workplaces and Saturday-night destinations have faded rapidly. Economic energies have shifted to what the Washington Post's Joel Garreau calls suburban "edge cities" and now, even more atomizingly, to telecommuting.

Societal secessionism extends into all aspects of American life. The big white house on the hill, once a symbol of community leadership, is now likely to be in a gated community. Even if outside the walls, its residents are likely to contract with a private security service. And while The New York Times' Russell Baker recently reminisced about a common audience for 1930's movie theater newsreels, from which the appearance of Franklin D. Roosevelt would stir scattered hisses and louder cheers, today's audiences are more likely to be home watching their VCRs.

Even in those swelling symbols of community spirit, professional sports teams - much praised for their unifying power by owners who want the public to build them stadiums - upscale fans are now likely to view the contests from private skyboxes. The view of the game from the boxes is not very good, but their inhabitants tower over the other fans in ticket price, altitude and social status.

Much of this trend is class-based, what Harvard political scientist Michael Sandel calls "the secession of the affluent from the public sphere." That's significant enough in itself - the affluent tend to set both fashions and tax policy - but the secession extends through the society, as people prefer the comfort of their own kind, a phrase now less likely to have an ethnic ring than a socioeconomic level.

Public schools are among our few surviving connectors - and like all the others, they're losing their power to bring Americans together. While public schools clearly have significant problems, their state of siege may have less to do with their own shortcomings than with an aggressively atomizing atmosphere.

And in a time of social separation, schools can represent the issues that people most want to separate themselves from.

"Class and race bias enter into all this, keeping us from seeing the good in poor schools and orienting us toward stereotype and sweeping condemnation," writes Rose in Possible Lives, a book that explores the determination and effort that remakes schools all over the country and laments our "limited perception" of the possibilities.

"Contributing as well to our disillusion with the schools," Rose continues, "is a general loss of faith in public institutions and an idealization of the private sphere and the free market. Finally, these tendencies have been skillfully manipulated during the past decade by legislators, policy analysts, and entrepreneurs who want to restrict funding to public education, subject it to market forces, and, ultimately, to privatize it."

Public schools all over the country face financial squeezes, comprised of greater demands upon them, judicial pressure for equalization of funding across entire states, and taxpayer revolt spiked with philosophical rejection. Under social, financial and ideological pressure, public schools are being challenged for their students, their predominance, and their justification. Increasingly, educational critics' goals are not to support or improve public schools, but to replace universality with ever smaller circles: publicly financed but independently-run charter schools, voucher-supported private (and generally religious) schools, home schooling.

The language of the dispute says everything. Public school opponents now seek even to repossess public schools' name; the preferred term is "government schools," or "government monopoly schools."

Public schools have been caught up in a general derision of all things governmental, when the worst thing that can be said of any effort is that it's a government project. During the 1960's, a solid majority of Americans told pollsters that the federal government could be relied on to do the right thing most of the time; by the '90's, the percentage was down in the 20's.

A look at the two great educational upheavals of the 20th century reveals the difference in atmosphere. The Soviet Union's launching of Sputnik in 1957 also launched a huge national outcry about the presumed shortcomings of American education, especially in the sciences. But the answer, spurred by advocates such as the commission led by Adm. Hyman Rickover, was always thought to be improved and more demanding public schools. There was popular support for the official response of more federal spending on science, math and foreign language education - spending considered a part of the national defense, symbolized in a National Defense Education Act.

Compare the difference, in language and public response, with the report of the Bell Commission, "A Nation At Risk," in the 1980's. If a foreign power had given America its current schools, warned the report, it would have been considered "an act of war." In 30 years, public schools had gone from bulwark of defense to military threat.

Even more dramatic was the response to the report. Instead of the 1950's expectation that the answer would be found within public schools, a wide variety of critics sought a solution virtually anywhere else.

The clash of worldviews was vividly shown recently in a single week's legislative debate in Idaho. Idaho's Teacher of the Year, making the standard plea for more resources in a bare time, declared that his job was to prepare students to be "citizens in a democracy - a fragile democracy." At the same time, an Idaho state senator pressed her bill providing a $1,000 tax credit for students in independent schools by promising it would encourage students to leave the public schools - which would save Idaho taxpayers a lot of money.

We're being pulled ever further from the original, even more explicit concept of "common schools" - an image which today survives only in a few linguistic relics such as the Oregon Common School Fund. Inevitably, the change in names reflects a change in meaning.

"Historically," writes Benjamin R. Barber of Rutgers, "the meaning of public education was precisely education into what it meant to belong to a public: education in the res publica - in commonality, in community, in the common constitution that made plurality and difference possible."

In other words, E Pluribus Unum - or even E Multiculturus Unum.

"The American public school, how remarkable it will seem someday," Garrison Keillor wrote recently, looking forward to the future of nostalgia. "With the introduction of school vouchers, you got to send your kids to schools where they learned the TRUTH - your truth - Our Lady of Sorrows, Foursquare Millenial Gospel, Moon Goddess, Malcolm X, the Open School of Whatever, the Academy of Hairy-Legged Individualism, the School of the Green Striped Tie, you name it, and who could argue with the idea of free choice? - until you stop and think about the old idea of the public school, a place where you went to find out who inhabits this society other than people like you."

The economic and secessionist views of schooling actually merge together in a zero-sum, hide-the-other-student's-notes approach to the future, in which the goal is not to improve education but to improve your kid's prospects. By contrast, a common-experience view of schooling underlines the idea that other students, as citizens, will still be shaping your kid's life - and not just his tax bracket.

The retreat from valuing a common-experience approach has been driven by a virtually universal repetition that the current public education system has collapsed, that it's a sad remnant of a past golden time. Evidence is widely cited: the decline in upper-level SAT scores, more remedial coursework in college, school violence. Sending a kid to public school, one might conclude, is just this side of child abuse.

"If education were a war," declared the previously not very interested in the subject Bob Dole during his acceptance speech at the 1996 Republican convention, "you would be losing it. If it were a patient," he continued, "it would be dying."

Only occasionally does anyone point out that while schools aren't doing everything well, they're doing a lot more - and for a lot more people - than in the past.

"The belief that there was once a golden age in public education is as prevalent as it is false," Sara Mosle wrote recently in the New York Times Magazine. She quoted former New York City schools' Chancellor Ramon Cortines pointing out that "schools didn't even track dropout rates until the early 1960's. We are attempting to care about students that we have never cared about before."

"Americans have been scared silly about their schools," Peter W. Cookson of Columbia University wrote this year in the Brookings Quarterly. There were, Cookson conceded, major problems in urban education - which, he noted, had more to do with failed urban policy than education policy. "But many public schools," he pointed out, "especially in the suburbs, are far better today than they were 25 years ago."

A 1995 study from the Rand Institute on Education and Training found that on average, 1990's teen-agers were better educated than 1970's teenagers, especially among minorities. Test scores, explained David Grissman, the study's leading researcher, had been going up steadily for 20 years. Scores in 1997 including the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the American College Test and the National Assessment of educational Progress gave further indications of improvement.

"Contrary to popular wisdom, American schools are not an utter failure," insists Deborah W. Meier, who developed the innovative and widely vaunted Central Park East public school in New York. "When I was a kid in the thirties, fewer than half our fellow citizens ever started high school, much less finished it. The United States still ranks at the top in international tests of literacy. And we remain one of the world's most productive nations."

But the certainty that American education has fallen from former glory is pervasive, along with beliefs in bygone golden ages in politics, family life and television comedy. Recently, a writer on the op-ed page of The New York Times compared the dismal state of contemporary education with the glowing curriculum of late-19th century South Dakota - a vision that had stayed with her, she explained, ever since she read about it in Little House on the Prairie.

More than any other issue facing America - except perhaps race - education is discussed with a hazy mix of anecdote, nostalgia and preconception which needs to be addressed before deciding how to improve our schools. "God knows, there is a lot wrong with our schools," writes Mike Rose. "But the scope and sweep of the negative public talk is what concerns me, for it excludes the powerful, challenging work done in schools day by day across the country, and it limits profoundly the vocabulary and imagery available to us, constrains the way we frame problems, blinkers our imagination. This kind of talk fosters neither critique nor analysis but rather a grand dismissiveness of despair."

And it spurs a belief that just about anything - the further from our current model, the better - would be an improvement. So schoolchildren are offered salvation through a wide range of varyingly fashionable fixes - charter schools, contract schools, vouchers, uniforms, computer technology, distance learning, merit pay, school prayers.

The education debate has featured so many silver bullets that the argument has owed more to The Lone Ranger than Plato. Any or all of these silver bullets can work with some kids, in some places. But increasing reliance on them also has a cost, in a more separated society.

The likelihood of this widening chasm increases in the current national debate on charter schools, with their advocates insisting that local school boards should hand over charter school money with as few rules as possible, lest the new operations be infected with the public schools' failure.

In 1996, the Washington Times reported on the Marcus Garvey Public Charter School, in Washington, D.C., in which students dressed in military fatigues and studied "The Destruction of Black Civilization." A visiting white reporter said she was shoved out of the building by eight students, led by principal Mary A.T. Anigbo, yelling, "Get your white ass out of this school."

To Michael Kelly, editor of The New Republic, the episode was a warning about the logical outcomes of charter and voucher proposals. "A pluralistic society cannot sustain a scheme in which the citizenry pays for a school but has no influence in how the school is run," argued Kelly. "Public money is shared money, and it is to be used for the furtherance of shared values, in the interests of e pluribus unum. Charter schools and the like ... take from the pluribus to destroy the unum. If you say that the taxpayers should support the Little Sisters of the Poor to run their private school as they see fit... you must also say that we should pay for Mary T. Anigbo to run a place where black children learn that white people are their enemies, and act accordingly.

Government might, as Amy Stuart Wells of UCLA suggests, "target federal funds specifically to charter schools that are racially and socioeconomically diverse," to "shape the charter school reform movement to democratic ends." It's not clear, however, that the movement wants to be shaped to that end; charter and voucher schools are widely seen as efforts to reinforce rather than to broaden, ways for like-minded parents to fulfill their own expectations.

The secessionist attitude of many charter advocates extends beyond curriculum and structure, sometimes to the point of implying an additional agenda. To a recent inquiry about charter schools run by teachers' unions - the people who actually do the teaching - conservative scholar Chester Finn declared that that idea would defeat the whole point, which was hiring and firing teachers at will.

As Paul Newman says in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, after kicking his knife-fight opponent in the groin, "it's always good to get the ground rules straight."

There are, of course, some countries that provide wide latitude in the schools they're willing to pay for, in some cases underwriting religious schools with government money. But several of them - such as Quebec and Northern Ireland - offer a less-than-reassuring example of the effect on public sense of community. If a society pays to have its children taught inconsistent outlooks, it shouldn't be surprised when they turn into citizens with inconsistent perceptions of society - and of each other.

These drawbacks might be faced, somehow, if atomizing the educational experience were the only way to improve performance, but the nations regarded with such American admiration have generally taken a different course.

Japanese education, for example, is overwhelmingly a public school system - although with multiple private tutorial and cram schools. The first, and constant, lesson taught to all students in the Japanese public school system is how to be Japanese - an assignment that is at once political, social and cultural. Japanese schools would understand Rose's "vocabulary of joy, courage, respect, decency, esthetics, intellect, civility" - although, being Japanese instead of American, their emphasis on each may be different from our choice. So would the policy-makers of France - where very young students are taught not only a demanding, nationally binding curriculum, but also something about their nation's cheeses.

Somehow, the countries that produce the highest test scores also produce the strongest sense of common identity, that shared sense of history, values and self that bind a nation's people together and define its character. From Singapore to Stuttgart, the idea of education as the common pursuit of a common purpose often seems to spur and intensify the learning process.

But many critics, watching the successes of other nations' educational systems, are prepared to do anything except follow their example: Make a firm national commitment to a public school system that provides a common experience and common expectations.

Instead, Americans are offered repeated proposals for going around and outside the system, at whatever cost to common identity and common purpose. Unfortunately, it is the international challenge and not the international example that haunts American thinking on education. "The movement to standards is primarily an economic issue," recently explained Stanford's Michael Kirst. "The big changes in education always come from outside, like Sputnik, the Vietnam War... In the 1980's, after the recession, Toyota replaced Sputnik."

To a large degree, therefore, the drive to remake U.S. education is not an effort to reaffirm American values; it's a program brought to you by Toyota. The mid-'80's certainty that U.S. education was costing the country vital ground in its race with the Germans and Japanese has long survived America's surge past both those economies in the '90's.

So, as Kirst notes, educational reforms are now presented in global terms, and in economic language. For example, Oregon's school reform plan pledges to create "the best educated and prepared work force in America by the year 2000, and a work force equal to any in the world by 2010."

In the last five years, of course, the sweep of this language has been matched by a narrowing of resources; Oregon apparently expects to achieve these towering levels of achievement by spending significantly less, in real dollars per student, than it laid out to reach mediocrity in 1990. With many other states moving to increase their spending and commitment, "best in America" is clearly just a figure of speech - if not a figure of self-delusion.

But if Oregon is falling behind other states in support for its schools, the state is at the height of conceptual fashion. Like many states, it is now in the midst of an education reform drive, and Oregon's is driven by a dream of employability. As David Smigelski wrote recently in Willamette Week, the Oregon education reform bill's language actually invokes employers and the state's Workforce Quality Council, while showing much less interest in how the education system will adapt itself to the vision. The vision is to have students directed toward a specific career direction somewhere in high school - and grow up to be taxpayers. An early inspiration for the program was the expectation that students would specialize in one of six career tracks: information systems; health and human services; manufacturing and engineering; natural science and resources; professional, public and commercial services; and trade and tourism. (Just which includes working at Starbuck's is unclear.) Districts across the state are busily expanding career training - while cutting away at many of the traditional public school options.

Education as vocationalism in service to society becomes a matter of socialization rather than scrutiny, of spelling out consequences rather than probing premises, of answering society's questions rather than questioning society's answers," warns Rutgers' Benjamin Barber. "Where once the student was taught that the unexamined life is not worth living, he is now taught that the profitably lived life is not worth examining."

That is, of course, a very functional attitude to instill in a taxpayer. And producing taxpayers is now our enduring priority, at a time when, due to budget cuts, cultural connectors such as arts and social connectors such as athletics are being reduced or made less accessible to Oregon students. At each round of cuts, administrators driven by a need to save the "basics" - a phrase suggesting that the minimum is now the maximum - whittle at cultural offerings, reducing music teachers and museum field trips.

It's hard to criticize their choices; while there may still be some fat around, we've often been choosing among vital organs. But we're leaving ourselves with a narrower educational experience, and telling ourselves that it's preparation for the future - a future that, in self-fulfilling prophesy, will be based more on computers than community.

There has been, in America's past, a broader concept of what schools wanted to produce, of what it meant to be an educated citizen. "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy," the crustily unsentimental John Adams wrote one month after the first Congress met. "My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain."

Admittedly, history doesn't list many Oregon school programs in porcelain - although there may be community college courses training denturists. But within recent memory, Oregon schools had strong, well-supported programs in arts, music and drama, along with athletic programs open to all students on multiple levels. Now, teachers and coaches in all these areas have been cut away, programs reduced, and students billed up to $150 for participation in such activities.

The decisions have been presented persuasively as unavoidable, squeezing some enrichments off the boat to make room for the vital basics, and it can hardly be said that Oregon's citizenry has risen in protest. But according to a vision that has extended from Adams and Jefferson to the now-slashed arts program at Portland's Jefferson High School, cultural preparation is important if you're actually thinking about producing citizens - and about the society you expect them to produce.

And Oregon is far from the only place where arts and music have been downgraded in favor of more marketable skills in a drive to preserve the economy while risking the society. "Arts education in many of the nation's 15,000 school districts remains impoverished or non-existent," the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities reported in February. "Many schools give their music and art teachers astronomical student loads and unmanageable class sizes while asking these teachers to travel to different schools every week. In Boston elementary schools, one music teacher is responsible on average for over 800 students. In Denver the ratio is one to 700 students... The average amount of time spent on music has fallen by 29 percent in the last 35 years."

There are exceptions: Florida, in trying to carry out its Sunshine State Standards, has actually been investing more in arts education. But from 1992-93 through 1996-97, Oregon schools have gone from 1149 music teachers to 983 - and the drop may not have hit bottom. "I don't think students have that opportunity to dive into the arts," Jamey Hampton, a Portland timber executive and head of a local dance company, recently told The Oregonian. "I see that opportunity evaporating."

Hampton's answer, unfortunately if understandably, was to help found a new local private school. The loss of arts education is not only in student opportunity, or in a severely reduced number of Americans capable of appreciating Mr. Holland's Opus. As the report notes, "Arts education is one of the strongest predictors of later audience participation;" and involvement in the various institutions of the society is a binding definition of citizenship. That, at least, was the view of the Greeks, who invented both citizenship and the downtown arts center.

It's not, of course, a requirement of Oregon citizenship to attend the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland, just as it's technically true that Oregonians are not legally required to flyfish. But just as much of Oregon's outdoors policy has recognized the importance of flyfishing to the state's identity, Oregon's educational policy needs to recognize the binding and broadening impact of drier cultural pursuits. Ideally, the involved Oregon citizen of the future will support local institutions besides the state department of revenue.

But Oregon, like some other states, will be offering an ever narrower school experience to its students, with fewer options and possibilities and students directed to think in career terms as early as possible. Looking not at the grand design, but at the realities of school resources and offerings, it's hard to see the broad educational foundation for this specific vocational training.

The goal seems even more distant from an objective of producing not just computer programmers and medical technicians, but citizens. In his influential new book, The Schools We Need - And Why We Don't Have Them, University of Virginia professor E.D. Hirsch argues, "If schooling is going to become more and more specialized in later life, it is ever more important to map out the wider intellectual landscape accurately and well in the earlier years. Otherwise, we shall produce not critical thinkers but narrow, ignorant ones, subject to delusion and rhetoric." And their primary identification with the larger society will be when they pay taxes - and, of course, vote.

Vocationalism is not only shallow ground on which to build a society and an education - it's also shifting ground. Despite all the sweeping certainties about the information society unfolding before us, its actualities and opportunities are far from predictable. Bill Clinton and Al Gore spent much of 1996 solemnly invoking the Internet as the path to the future. Yet when the class of '96 was in middle school, President Ronald Reagan had never heard of it - and there was nothing to hear of. The hot career future then was in aerospace, which five years later would have guaranteed only a middling spot in a Southern California unemployment line.

The one-word key to the future whispered to Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate in 1967 - "Plastics" - would now be more persuasive intoned in Mandarin. The one-word key to the future widely whispered in 1997 -- "Silicon" - may yet have a similar destiny.

Despite the mutual fund murmurs, it's quite possible that the 1990's forecast of the 2020's economy will be as stunningly wrong as the 1960's expectations of the 1990's. From the economy of that time, it seemed that anyone working on a television assembly line would be secure for life; it's now clear that any American expecting to make a career in picture tubes would have to relocate dramatically. More recently, computer programming has been the magic wand offered by every community college and matchbook correspondence course; we're already finding that it can be done at a tenth the American wage by highly trained residents of Bombay, and sent back to California with a keystroke.

Every educationist declares ringingly that the future will not look like the past. We need to remember that it probably won't look like our vision of the future, either. "Nearly every school system in the country is responding to the crisis in American education by scurrying to prepare the next generation for work in the emerging information-age society. Computer literacy has become a sacred mantra," noted Jeremy Rifkin, author of "The End of Work," last year in Education Week. But, he noted, "While the 'knowledge sector' will create some new jobs, they will be too few to accommodate the millions of workers displaced by the new technologies."

With careers disappearing in the manufacturing industries (already) and the knowledge industries (foreseeably), Rifkin's answer is an expansion of job opportunities in the public service sector - and his strategy for preparing for them is to include community service as part of the public school curriculum. "Teaching children the value of service and the importance of creating social capital in their own communities is being viewed as a learning tool to prepare the next generation for its responsibilities to the civil society," he writes. "Preparing the next generation for potential work in both the marketplace and the civil sector is, perhaps, the single most important challenge facing educators and the American school system."

Rifkin's crystal ball may be no clearer than anybody else's; he has disapproved of every technological advance since the clock with hands. Possibly nobody should be allowed to predict the fiscal future except people who bought Microsoft in 1980 - and even Bill Gates missed the coming of the Internet.

But whatever doubts we might have about turning community identity into homework, Rifkin's core point is only too believable. We don't know - although we shouldn't stop trying to imagine - what will be an economically successful individual of the year 2025. At some level, we even admit this to ourselves, which is why much of our guidance for the future sounds partly self-evident, partly psychobabble. The flyer on "What Employers Want," found earlier outside a Portland first-grade class, distilled from a 1988 U.S. Department of Labor study, praises the value of "Personal Management: Self-Esteem, Goal Setting/Motivation and Personal/Career Development." The only useful thing this tells us is that it was a dangerous idea to turn Personnel departments into Human Resources offices.

We know more about the traits of a successful American citizen of the future: a strong sense of national heritage and identity, a comfort with the different threads making up the society, and an understanding of a citizen's responsibility to it. We also know that unless the product of our education system is that kind of citizen - and lives among others like himself - he may find limited value in his Goal Setting/Motivation skills.

And virtually every society has known that its greatest tool and opportunity for producing that citizen is its common school system. Nation-states from France to Japan have instinctively seen the importance of a common education, and of their students coming to understand and experience their role and identity in society. The role of the public school becomes even more important in a society where other common spaces are vanishing. In the mid-19th century, Frederick Law Olmstead designed New York's Central Park as a common retreat for all the citizens of the city; as The New York Times pointed out this summer, even a walk in the park loses its unifying power when so many citizens are at home on their treadmills.

Lately, even in the midst of volleys of verbiage insisting that the public schools' role is to produce employable products, the idea of a broader mission is resurfacing. Often, it's reflected in just the kind of community efforts Rifkin espouses. Educators and school districts, and the entire state of Maryland, are putting public service time into high school curricula, making community service a graduation requirement just like gym. In a field swept by sudden new inspirations, this old idea is now one of the newest.

"I think one of the things that has been lost in the past decade and maybe longer," ventures Don Ernst, director of government relations for the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, "is the belief that there is more to education than simply preparing people for a job. "So (a community service requirement) is about reminding us that schools also exist to educate kids to be good citizens and to re-create and reinvigorate American democracy." In fact, the public school system has traditionally been the prime American tool for both of those objectives - from Jefferson through the rise of compulsory education through the arrival of the mandatory AIDS curriculum. For much of that time, certainly, the higher levels of public education were self-selective, as most young Americans were expected to leave school and start helping the family at an age before a modern adolescent begins the soul-shaping struggle with acne. But the objectives of the public school system always went beyond the three Rs; common schools sought not just to teach division but to prevent it. Schools were not vocationally driven - largely because the traditional economy did not require it, but also largely because they saw themselves as having a social role at least as important as their economic mission.

All of those schoolboy elocution contests weren't simply about diction, but also about direction. For a century, all across the country - with certain exceptions in the former Confederacy - voices that hadn't changed yet were raised in the ripest chestnut of American oratory, Daniel Webster's Second Reply to South Carolina's Senator Robert Hayne: "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable."

Often, the voices were raised in accents that Daniel Webster might have found a bit puzzling. Especially from the last decade of the 19th century until the immigration restriction act of 1924, a wildly diverse population streamed through American schools, and the public schools' prime objective was to assimilate them. The importance of the effort was shown by the places that rejected it; the South segregated black students, and California isolated its Asians, precisely because power structures did not want those groups assimilated - and understood the formidable power of public education to do so.

Now, the challenges of assimilation, of imparting an identity and a culture, are at least as strong. This year, a clear indication appeared on a Portland public schools lunch schedule.

"Over the last number of years, we at Portland Public Schools Nutrition Services have seen the cultural diversity of our student population expand very quickly," it declared, right under the listing for Wednesday's chickenwich. "New PPS students can look forward to making friends from around the world! Vietnamese, Russians, Yugoslavians, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Bosnians, Chinese and Japanese. Gradually, we are trying to make those students acclimate and feel at home in our schools and cafeterias." That has always been a vital mission of public schools, even if it has not traditionally involved vegetable yakisoba."

Public schools played a big role in holding our nation together," wrote Albert Shanker, the late head of the American Federation of Teachers and passionate advocate of education reform, in 1990. "They brought together children of different races, languages, religions, and cultures and gave them a common language and a sense of common purpose. We have not outgrown our need for this; far from it. Today, Americans come from more different countries and speak more different languages than ever before... Critics now say that the common school never existed, that it's time to abandon this ideal in favor of schools that are designed to appeal to groups based on ethnicity, race, religion, class or common interests of various kinds. But schools like these would foster divisions in our society; they would be like setting a time bomb."

In a week's newspapers, we can see various attitudes that would set the fuses. These outlooks extend from insistences that the United States is based on a particular religious belief to the declaration of the Oakland school board that black Americans speak a language - Ebonics - that is "genetically different" from English.

Clearly, parents have the right to teach their children any creed, however individualized and anti-social, they wish. The question is why a society with a healthy interest in its own survival would want to encourage it - or subsidize it.

The argument of those who would disassemble the public school system - and the common experience it provides - is that public education has failed, that it has proven inadequate to the emerging economy and increased social pressures, that it has dissolved into violence, indifference and special interests. There is now nothing that can be said about the school system too derogatory to be believed, often by people who have not actually seen a school since Sputnik. But as studies and experts cited earlier argue, it's by no means clear that public education has been such a failure that virtually anything would be better. And the alternatives, however eagerly offered, cannot themselves show success in educating and assimilating large numbers of students; often the results of even small tests are mixed or flatly disappointing.

While public education has certainly produced dramatic examples of shortfall, the concerns and alarms about the situation in the last decade have stirred at least as much creativity within the system as outside it. In fact, as Gustavo A. Mellender, dean of the graduate school of education at Virginia's George Mason University, argued in Education Week this March, the problem is not insoluble: "We know how to correct it. It's neither magical nor mysterious. Thousands of schools have already done so; hundreds of successful models exist."

They offer many different styles, but a common virtue: inclusiveness, a sense that schools should reflect the larger society that creates and supports them. "The best public schools in the city are the best schools, period," concludes Clara Hemphill, a former war correspondent who has spent the last two years studying New York City public schools one by one. She found that when public education works, the richness of the student body deepens the reach of the faculty. "The rewards of public education are not only social - you learn to live with all kinds of people - but also academic. Better teachers, better programs, and you sit next to a kid who makes geography and history real."

A wide range of private/contract/voucher/home-school approaches might produce taxpayers - currently our dominant but disappointing objective. A successful public school system, with a broad understanding of what's meant by a common culture, is more likely to produce citizens. "Citizens are men and women educated for excellence," writes Benjamin Barber, "by which term I mean the knowledge and competence to govern in common their own lives... Democratic education mediates the ancient quarrel between the rule of opinion and the rule of excellence by informing opinion and, through universal education in excellence, creating an aristocracy of everyone."

The key first step, as Mike Rose urges, is to be willing to think about public schools differently. The fiscal and philosophical abandonments of our schools bolster each other, turning both into self-fulfilling prophesies. People are more willing to pay for what they believe in. Just as form follows function, funding follows philosophy. Believing that public schools can work is not like closing your eyes and hoping that Tinker bell will live. It's more like opening your eyes to a wide variety of advantages that successful common schools are likely to provide, and to the vital role that they have historically played in America.

Eugene McCarthy once said that to succeed at coaching football, you had to be smart enough to understand it and dumb enough to think it was important. To envision a successful public education system requires just the opposite skills: You need to be dumb enough to ignore all the intellectual fashions and smart enough to see just how vitally important such a system is. And also to think about - and talk about - public school possibilities that we seem to see only in flashes, but that hint at a brilliance that could light up our society. "Bringing our children closer to universal competence is important," concludes Hirsch. "But an equally important contribution of the truly common school would be the strengthening of universal communicability and a sense of community within the public sphere. In the long run, that could be the common school's most important contribution to preserving the fragile fabric of our democracy."

Thomas Jefferson lived in, and idealized, a society where learning and livelihood were largely apart from each other. In his vision of an agrarian republic with a small number of urban (and Democratic-Republican) artisans, occupational skills would be drawn from the soil and from apprenticeship. He bought Louisiana to provide enough space for generations of farmers, without seeing that the knowledge that fascinated him - and that he sent Meriwether Lewis into the new territory to enhance - would remodel his republic. The truly vital educational need for most citizens, Jefferson believed, was to equip them to be citizens, to make public judgments and to recognize public dangers. To him, a greater challenge than wresting a living from the soil was participating in this daring, improbable new experiment of a continental democracy, especially one open to the world and constantly facing choices never imagined by the generation before.

Inescapably, livelihood is now a much stronger theme in our idea of education, a theme that gives us computers in first-grade classes and career-focused middle schools. But while the marketplace is now more compelling, the challenge seen by Jefferson is no less demanding. And as America has always believed, a common experience can produce an uncommon society.