In this review essay, Kathleen Knight Abowitz discusses three recent books related to democratic public life and schooling: Susan H. Fuhrman and Marvin Lazerson's "The Public Schools," Walter C. Parker's "Teaching Democracy: Unity and Diversity in Public Life," and Kevin McDonough and Walter Feinberg's "Education and Citizenship in Liberal-Democratic Societies." Abowitz details how each text is inspired by meanings of liberal democracy that evolved during the Enlightenment era, in which individual rights were constitutionally coded and equality came to be a powerful social and educational ideal, and how each book also takes up different sorts of Enlightenment traditions of public life and education, attempting to revitalize their meanings for public education today. Yet while these books are inspiring and instructive in numerous ways, they are also notable for the issues they fail to take into theoretical account, particularly the colonization of public spheres by the private and market-based spheres of commerce, and the ways in which increasing ecological crisis calls for new ways of conceiving our political and educational frameworks.