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education—even of one’s own child—as someone else’s job (or problem). When challenges arise in a public school, it’s rare or only on the margins that families or the community are permitted to come up with solutions or innovations.
    What’s lost in such crowding-out and such shifts of power?
    Quality of life, for one thing. In the case of the decimated Main Street, the glue of neighborliness disappears when everyone drives to the superstore. Eye contact, touch, presence, and smiles: all decline and disappear. In the case of the school-as-fortress, children get a desiccated experience of what it means to live in community. No adult outside the school owes them any special support or concern, and they in turn don’t owe any back. Our schools are worse for it.
    What’s lost is the willingness of people to make judgments in situations that are not formulaic but are messy and human, and then to trust each other to make the best calls we can. As Philip Howard has argued powerfully, in a society that over-relies on laws and rules to govern everyday interactions—one where much is prescribed and proscribed and “what is not prohibited is permitted”—people forget how to exercise both rights and responsibilities.
    What’s lost, in short, is citizenship. By “citizenship” we do not mean legal documentation status. We mean living in a pro-social way at every scale of life. We mean showing up for each other.
    Citizenship matters because it delivers for society what neither the market nor the state can or should. Citizenship isn’t just voting. Nor is it just Good Samaritanism. A 21st-century perspective forces us to acknowledge that citizenship is, quite simply, the work of being in public. It encompasses behaviors like courtesy and civility, the “etiquette of freedom,” to use poet Gary Snyder’s phrase. It encompasses small acts like teaching your children to be honest in their dealings with others. It includes serving on community councils and as soccer coaches. It means leaving a place in better shape than you found it. It means helping others during hard times and being able to ask for help. It means resisting the temptation to call a problem someone else’s.
    Central to our conception of citizenship is an ethic of sacrifice—and a belief that sacrifice should be progressive. That is to say, being a citizen is not just about serving others and contributing when it’s convenient but also when it’s inconvenient. And the scale of the contribution should grow in proportion to the ability of the person to contribute. Just as progressive taxation asks those who can pull the most weight to do so, progressive civic contribution asks those who have the most civic capacity—and who have benefited most from our civic culture—to take the most responsibility.

Citizen Gardeners
     
    In the opening section of this book, we laid out a new story of self-interest. It is an obliteration of the myth of rugged individualism. The self-made person may be a great American icon but he is also a fairy tale. Ask that individualist who made the bootstraps she is pulling up. Ask her who paved the road that she walked on to be able to see you, who taught her the very language she uses to assert her independence.
    Citizenship is a recognition that we are interdependent—that there are values, systems, and skills that hold us together as social animals, particularly in a tolerant, multiethnic market democracy. More than that, citizenship is a rejection of what Francis Fukuyama has labeled “the Hobbesian fallacy,” the ahistorical notion that humans began as individuals and only later rationally calculated that it made sense to band together in society. In fact, humans have been social from very the start; individualism is a creation of recent centuries.
    The old story of self-interest is a product—and perpetuator —of Machinebrain. The new story is an exemplar of Gardenbrain.
    Machinebrain held that citizens are