Contemporary music education is increasingly circumscribed by standardization and performativity, pushing publicness and morality to the margins: system-level emphases on knowledge and skills attenuate democratic concern and ethical formation. Grounded in John Dewey’s political philosophy, this paper treats democracy as a way of life and advances two core claims: first, publicness is not a pre-given place but a relational form constituted as people mutually affect one another and address shared problems; second, morality is not inculcation but practical growth through experience and reflective action.Within this frame, the paper turns to Paul Woodford (2005; 2019), whose sustained Deweyan reinterpretation stresses educators’ and institutions’ ethical-historical responsibilities and critiques both aesthetic formalism and neoliberal standardization. Read through Dewey, Woodford’s position recasts musical practice as a site for generating publicness and cultivating moral agency, rather than a value-neutral craft or a vehicle of ideology.The study proposes publicness-morality as political-philosophical coordinates for music education, examining how policy texts and practice discourses distribute voice, delimit values, and demarcate community. On this basis, it outlines directions for reconstruction: prioritizing experience and reflection, juxtaposing diverse musical traditions, and sustaining awareness of power and history. These moves detach music education from institutional narratives of neutrality and reorient it toward the reconstruction of democratic life. Thus, music education is no longer framed solely as aesthetic or technical training but as a political practice that shapes publics and forms ethical subjects.