This book discusses current market-based educational discourses and how they have undermined
the notion of the public in public education by allowing private visions of education to define
the public democratic imagination. Against this discouraging background this text embraces
Freire's understanding of hope as an ontological need and calls for finding new public grounds
for our public imagination. It further articulates Freire's mandate to unveil historically
concrete practices to sustain democratic educational visions no matter how difficult this task
may be by (1) presenting an indepth description of the pedagogies and curriculums of eleven
schools across historical and geographical locations that have worked or are still working with
disenfranchised communities and that have publicly hoped for a better future for their students
and by (2) reflecting on how the stories of these schools offer us new opportunities to rethink
our own pedagogical commitment to public visions of education. To promote this reflection this
book offers the notion of publicly imagined public education as a conceptual tool to help
understand the historical and discursive specificity of schools' hopes and to (re)claim public
schools as legitimate sites of public imagination.
