As if to presage the eclipse of the public in these postmodern times, John Dewey criticized the democracy of American society in 1927. The "eclipse of the public" that he warns against is not only a matter of political participation, but also a moral issue that has a bearing on one's way of living. Dewey captured the ethos of his times in connection with the sense of "hollowness," This is a sense that one cannot articulate one's feeling, or even that one does not know "what one really wants" in the loss of one's own taste. In Dewey's observation, the weakening of the personal sense of being is tied up with the loss of a sense of the common good in the public realm. When on cannot "think out loud," and when one's voice is released simply as a matter of superficial publicity, it cannot be contributed genuinely to the creation of the common good. This can be called the crisis of the loss of one's voice. In this state the idea of "citizenship," that Dewey criticizes, becomes empty as it simply comes to be a matter of conformity. His call for democratic participation and the rebuilding of the Great Community is driven by the sense of crisis over an entrenched gap between the private and the public.The loss of voice in the division between the private and the public continues to be a problem in our times. In the gratification of narrowly private desires in the consumer economy and in neo-liberal slogans of free choice, the eclipse of the public today has acquired new connotations. Despite educational and political calls for democratic participation, active citizenship, and social inclusion, there still prevails a nihilistic feeling that one cannot speak for oneself in public. There is a drive towards a kind of moral cleansing, which alienates the voice of the individual. On the global scene, where we are presented with the pressing challenges of ethnic and religious tensions, there is a fundamental sense of uncertainty about how to seek common ground. The meaning of the "public" is itself questioned with the idea of the global citizen. In contemporary democracy, the renewed task of how to relate the private and the public requires the reconstruction of the moral basis of our personal way of living. There is a need to regain the courage to trust one's own voice - in its bearing upon the perfection of one's self, the other, and culture as a whole - and to regain the strong, intense personal voice that can reach something common and larger than one's self.As Dewey says, the task is not only political but also moral and educational, involving the question of the how. In the light of this, I shall attempt to regain the significance of pragmatism as philosophy as education, in Hilary Putnam's words. Dewey's idea of creative democracy, if it is retuned more to the tragic sensibility of our times, can signal a powerful message for the re-education of voice. To this end I shall reconstruct Deweyan pragmatism in the light of Stanley Cavell's Emersonian moral perfectionism. In so doing, I shall propose an Emersonian ethic of "self-transcendence" as a way of joining the public and the private and reconceiving citizenship education.