The collection opens with Amy Gutman's defense of her version of democratic education against those who find her version too farreaching (“parentalists”) and those who find it not far-reaching enough (cosmopolitans and patriots). Christopher Eisgruber and Michael McConnell follow with commentaries on Gutman's piece, although McConnell uses Gutman as a launching pad for a lengthy excursion into his own views on a publicly financed voucher program. Nancy Rosenblum offers a commentary on McConnell's views, and Amy Gutman concludes Part I with a response to Eisgruber and McConnell.

Part I works particularly well, I think, because of these commentaries and responses. There is something of a dialogue here, and it enlivens the debate over democratic education. The final section of the collection, Part IV, has a similar format, although the principal author, Lawrence Blum, does not have an opportunity to respond to his three critics: William Galston, Anita Allen, and Andrew Valls. The topic in Part IV is important and one not considered enough in discussions about moral and political education—the need for and the effects of racial integration in and through education.

The middle sections of this collection are individual articles offering different perspectives on issues central to moral and political (read: liberal) education. In Part II, John Tomasi looks at some possible non-neutral consequences of liberal public education, while Peter De Marneffe argues that liberal neutrality can provide a morally adequate educational system. Harry Brighouse then argues that liberal education should be “autonomy-facilitating” to ensure that all children have an equal opportunity to live autonomous lives without necessarily having to live such lives, which would be the case if public education were “autonomypromoting.” James Dwyer concludes Part II with an argument for putting children's interests, rather than the state's or parents’ interests, front and center in the public education debate.

Also included in Part II, and one of the most interesting articles, partly because the subject is too often overlooked, is Rob Reich's paper on homeschooling. With a conservative estimate putting the number of homeschooled children at 1.3 million—more, as Reich tells us, than the combined number of children enrolled in schools in Wyoming, Alaska, Delaware, North Dakota, Vermont, South Dakota, Montana, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Hawaii, the bottom 10 states (in order) in school enrollment (p. 278)—homeschooling makes the number of students currently on vouchers pale in comparison. Here is an area where regulation needs to be taken seriously and immediately, as Reich shows.

Part III is composed of a single piece: Randall Curren's look at the price we pay not only for treating child criminals as adults but also for substituting punishment for education. This, too, is an area not explored often enough in discussions of moral and political education.

Because several of the contributors are political theorists, one might expect or hope, as I did, that with so tempestuous an issue as moral and political education, the authors would have devoted more space to political reality, to seeing how their various theories could play out in politics. This is especially true with regard to school vouchers, a topic central in five articles (McConnell, Gutman's Response, De Marneffe, Brighouse, Dwyer) and one on which most of the other articles touch. There are, scattered here and there, a few brushes with the empirical consequences of vouchers (Gutman, p. 176, and Brighouse, pp. 244–46, 249–50), but more than that is necessary.

No author examines, for example, three sticking points in voucher proposals (though Brighouse mentions one of them). First, what happens to those students left behind in failing schools? No one suggests that any realistic voucher scheme can avoid the problem of gradual effect. In short, there will be many students left in bad schools. What will become of them? Second, who will pay for transporting students to their schools of choice, public or private? Transportation costs can be substantial and must be factored into any proposed voucher system. Third, what do we do about parents or guardians who do not know about vouchers, do not care about choices, and/or do not understand what is involved in choice programs? If we use Gutman's example of Cambridge, Massachusetts (p. 177), where all middle schools are schools of choice, we can see a potential problem. The city government had to establish agencies to notify all parents in the city about the choices available to them; to explain to many parents, often in languages other than English, how the plan worked; and to remind parents repeatedly of deadlines and cutoff dates. Imagine the number of agencies necessary, and the cost of such agencies, in a nation of voucher schemes covering not just middle schools but elementary and high schools, public and private, as well.

Contrary to Blum's lead article in Part IV, the main educational concern of black parents and children, writes Valls (p. 466), “is not integration but quality education.” All parents want a good education for their children, usually in their neighborhood schools. That is no surprise. It is surprising, however, that the idea of “quality education” floats throughout this collection like a butterfly eluding the net. Of course, all parents want a good education, but what is it? It takes us no great distance to suggest, as Dwyer does at the end of his article, that the content of a good education can be, well, problematic (p. 343), this after he has completed an article touting quality education as the proper focus of child-centered interests.

Attempts to define quality education in this collection are mostly indirect. For several contributors, quality involves critical thinking. Yet there are questions around that concept that ought to be addressed; for example, What is critical thinking? How is it taught? Does it replace content with process? Is there a danger that in teaching critical thinking and deliberation, we may teach skills necessary for democracy but neglect democratic values and moral character? (It should be noted that to contributor Brighouse, this is not a danger but the very point in teaching critical thinking. See, especially, pp. 268–69.)

What is the political reality that serves as the context in which the contributors raise their questions? Education is supposed to develop students into fully functioning citizens and wellfunctioning adults. But does our democratic system require the kinds of curricular changes, say, toward critical thinking, that many of these authors demand? Perhaps if we want citizens to participate in our democratic system, we need a different kind of political education altogether. Perhaps we need an emphasis on character education, a topic underexamined in this collection, that can raise our voter turnout above 50%. Finally, would any of the proposals in this volume, if enacted, really prepare future citizens and future adults for the reality of politics in the twenty-first century? The only mention in this volume of global interdependence is Gutman's critique of education for cosmopolitanism. With the shift from industry to information as the technological base of our economies, with all that that shift has already wrought and with all that it portends, globalization or globalism seems here to stay. While globalization is not necessarily a form of cosmopolitanism and may even run counter to it, it needs to be a central topic in any discussion of today's moral and political education.