Over the last 200 years in Brazil, the notion of "public" has been established to mean the same as the notion of "state". Sergio Buarque de Holanda and, more recently, Marilena Chaui point out that the very old tradition of the appropriation of public goods by the private sector has been updated. However, the understanding of what is considered public has not always been the same. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, scientific and literary associations became responsible for public elementary education in provinces and municipalities. The study of these associations provide an indication that, in those times, the meaning of "public" had not yet been reduced to "state", as it would be in the Latin American political culture of the following century. This understanding of the "public" in education during the first half of the nineteenth century is key to revising the configuration of the public (state) education systems in the following century, when education came to be understood as the unique and exclusive responsibility of the nation state. It is a weighty task to question the political culture and the concepts that were formulated at the beginning of independent life in Brazil, especially for those who, like us, believe that the public dimension of citizen life should not be reduced to those customs that our nation state conceived and implemented throughout the past centuries. (Contains 20 footnotes and 1 figure.)