This volume is the second in a set of two published as the 2008 Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education. Planning for the volumes began more than five years ago, when the Society's Board of Directors expressed an interest in taking steps to encourage a more expansive, penetrating dialogue about education in democratic societies. Many of the Society's previous yearbooks have been remarkably accessible to lay audiences, but focused on particular specialties or topics within the field of professional education. The Board wondered whether it would be possible to prepare a set of yearbooks that would appeal to a broad cross-section of readers, ranging from school teachers to school board members, from parents to policymakers, from journalists to jurists. These ruminations eventually resolved into an exploration of the foundational reasons for education and its essential importance in democratic nations. Hence the main title for both volumes, "Why Do We Educate?" This second volume carries the subtitle, "Voices from the Conversation", while the first volume is subtitled "Renewing the Conversation". This volume collects examples of the educational conversation, both to illustrate the conversation as it has taken and is taking place, and to reveal the many facets of the conversation. Here readers will find essays commissioned especially for this volume, nested together with commencement addresses, newspaper columns and articles, speeches, commentaries found on the World Wide Web, excerpts from longer articles in journals and magazines, and cartoons. (Contains 11 notes.) [For Issue 1, see EJ822245.]