Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison Harry Brighouse, Ph.D., will give a lecture called “What Makes a School a Public School?” 

Traditional public schools in the US are characterized by several features: they are fully publicly funded, publicly provided, locally democratically accountable, secular, and enroll students from local neighborhoods. None, and no combination, of these features suffices to make a school public in the sense that matters morally: that they contribute appropriately to the implementation of legitimate public aims for education. Indeed at least two of the features — local democratic control and neighborhood schooling — are always at odds with those legitimate public aims in societies like ours that are at least somewhat unjustly unequal.