This year's Keynote and Plenary Speakers include:

Fault Lines in American Culture:
The Case for the Common School

The social landscape of the United States of America can be mapped by using a series of cultural fault lines that lie just beneath our society’s consciousness.  This cultural topography defines the dysfunction and success of our economic, social, and economic conditions in ways that contemporary surface descriptions fail to illuminate.  If left unattended these fissures will continue to divide and will diminish the republic.  If understood and addressed, America will experience a new birth of liberty and prosperity. The first responsibility of our public school is to provide that education necessary to sustain the nation in a way consistent with democratic values. Democracy and a market driven economy are not natural to human thinking or behavior – as citizens, we must work hard and work right to acquire the uncommon wisdom needed to keep us all free in a state of civilization.

H. Michael Hartoonian is Scholar in Residence at Hamline University, St. Paul, MN and former Professor and Senior Fellow and Director of the Institute for Democratic Capitalism, in the Department of Educational Policy and Administration, College of Education and Human Development University of Minnesota

Michael is also a former President of NCSS