What's public about public schools? Why do we invest in educating the next generation of Americans? What is it that drives our common purpose in educating children and at the same time divides us so passionately about how to educate them? Public schools have little to do with children. Schools are political and ideological institutions in which each generation battles among itself for supremacy in determining the purposes, goals and direction of public education. From battles over school lunch to school dress to school prayer, each generation reinterprets and recapitulates the political and...