Do most teachers live to teach or teach to live? With the economic crisis we are facing today, many have lost interest in their vocation?

If educators and others are to prevent this distinction between education and training from becoming blurred, it is crucial to both challenge the ongoing corporatization of public schools, while upholding the promise of the modern social contract in which all youth, guaranteed the necessary protections and opportunities, were a primary source of economic and moral investment, symbolizing the hope for a democratic future. In short, those individuals and groups concerned about the promise of education need to reclaim their commitment to future generations by taking seriously the Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's belief that the ultimate test of morality for any democratic society resides in the condition of its children. If public education is to honor this ethical commitment, it will have to not only re-establish its obligation to young people, but reclaim its role as a democratic public sphere and uphold its support for teachers.

Defending teachers as engaged intellectuals and public schools as democratic public spheres is not a call for any one ideology on the political spectrum to determine the shape of the future direction of public and university education. But at the same time, such a defense reflects a particular vision of the purpose and meaning of public and higher education and their crucial role in educating students to participate in an inclusive democracy. Teachers have a responsibility to engage critical pedagogy as a an ethical referent and a call to action for educators, parents, students and others to reclaim public education as a democratic public sphere, a place where teaching is not reduced to learning how to master either tests or acquire low level jobs skills, but a safe space where reason, understanding, dialogue and critical engagement are available to all faculty and students.

Education, if not teaching itself, in this reading, becomes the site of ongoing struggles to preserve and extend the conditions in which autonomy of judgment and freedom of action are informed by the democratic imperatives of equality, liberty and justice, while ratifying and legitimating the role of teachers as critical and public intellectuals. Viewing public schools as laboratories of democracy and teachers as critical intellectuals offers a new generation of educators an opportunity to understand education as a concrete reminder that the struggle for democracy is, in part, an attempt to liberate humanity from the blind obedience to authority and that individual and social agency gain meaning primarily through the freedoms guaranteed by the public sphere, where the autonomy of individuals only becomes meaningful under those conditions that guarantee the workings of an autonomous society. The current vicious assault on public school teachers is a reminder that the educational conditions that make democratic identities, values and politics possible and effective have to be fought for more urgently at a time when democratic public spheres, public goods and public spaces are under attack by market and other ideological fundamentalists who either believe that corporations can solve all human problems or that dissent is comparable to aiding terrorists - positions that share the common dominator of disabling a substantive notion of ethics, politics and democracy.

The rhetoric of accountability, privatization and standardization that now dominates both major political parties does more than deskill teachers, weaken teacher unions, dumb down the curriculum and punish students; it also offers up a model for education that undermines it as a public good. Under such circumstances, teacher work and autonomy are not only devalued; learning how to govern and be a critical citizen in a fragile democracy are hijacked. As Baldwin reminded us, we live in dangerous times, yet as educators, parents, activists and workers, we can address the current assault on democracy by building local and social movements that fight for the rights of teachers and students to teach and learn with the necessary autonomy, resources and dignity.

Democratic struggles cannot overemphasize the special responsibility of teachers as intellectuals to shatter the conventional wisdom and myths of those ideologies that would relegate educators to mere technicians, clerks of the empire or mere adjuncts of the corporation. As the late Pierre Bourdieu argued, the "power of the dominant order is not just economic, but intellectual - lying in the realm of beliefs," and it is precisely within the domain of ideas that a sense of utopian possibility can be restored to the public realm. 3 Teaching in this instance is not simply about critical thinking, but also about social engagement, a crucial element of not just learning and social engagement, but politics itself.

Most specifically, democracy necessitates quality teachers and critical pedagogical practices that provide a new ethic of freedom and a reassertion of collective responsibility as central preoccupations of a vibrant democratic culture and society. Such a task, in part, suggests that any movement for social change put education and the rights of students and teachers at the forefront of such a struggle. Teachers are more crucial in the struggle for democracy than security guards and the criminal justice system.

Students deserve more that being trained to be ignorant and willing accomplices of the corporation and the empire. Teachers represent a valued resource and are one of the few groups left that can educate students in ways that enable them to resist the collective insanity that now threatens this country. We need to take them seriously by giving them the dignity, labor conditions, salaries, freedom, time and support they deserve.

This may be the most important challenge Americans face as we move into the 21st century. James Baldwin, "A Talk to Teachers," The Saturday Review (December 21, 1963). Pierre Bourdieu and Gunter Grass, "The 'Progressive' Restoration: A Franco-German Dialogue," New Left Review 14 (March-April, 2003), p.

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