The book was originally published in 1988 under the title Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age by University of Minnesota Press.

Before writing Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life, Henry Giroux authored and co-authored several other books related to what he characterized as an ongoing crisis in education.

As a radical democrat, Giroux argued against the pursuit of apoliticism in public education, extending the ideas of John Dewey and similar thinkers who presented schools as core institutions of democracy.

[6] In connection with this definition, he states that the goal of education is "elimination of those ideological and material conditions that promote various forms of subjugation, segregation, brutality, and marginalization.

"[6] While distinguishing his argument from cultural relativism, which he describes as not sufficiently critical, Giroux argues that schools should be sites of struggle into which identity, social change, and empowerment are incorporated.

He argues that progressive and radical educators should engage with ethical issues, but should not simply dictate what is right and wrong, instead suggesting a focus on critical analysis of whether or not certain actions are politically and morally responsible.

[8] Publishers Weekly reviewed Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life positively, describing it as a "perceptive, piquant proposal for educational reform".

Drawing on William Fusfield's critique of civic humanist pedagogy,[11] Crawford described three "tensions" in Giroux's argument: "the tension between explicitly disavowing reproduction as an appropriate model of pedagogy while implicitly embracing it in the form of indoctrination ... between claiming to reject absolute values while positing absolutes in the guise of a 'provisional morality' ... between the Utopian possibilities of the project in theory and the rather less optimistic possibility of its implementation".

With regard to support for critical pedagogy, Brignall found the book "a diminutive attempt" because of its lack of appeal to "those with neutral, uninformed, or oppositional perspectives on education", and described some of Giroux's arguments as simple or even circular in nature.