Arguing for a renewal of Isocrates pedagogical techniques, I revise the first-year college writing course and reinvent it as a course in which students not only learn how to produce "academic" writing and to critique or appreciate extant texts but also learn how to use their writing to become active, engaged citizens in communities beyond the classroom and workplace. My proposal incorporates many of the innovative practices of existing composition pedagogies while adding and emphasizing the (re)new(ed) Isocratean concepts of public performance, political deliberation, and social action. I begin by revisiting the history of how the rhetorically based liberal arts curriculum in American higher education evolved into a curriculum based on the pursuit of a professional degree in a major discipline. I demonstrate how the Isocratean goal of training students to become active, engaged public citizens largely has been replaced by the practice of training students to become individual wage earners and how the Isocratean model of a broadly based and extensive study of public and civic discourse generally has been replaced by a one- or two-semester course in "first-year composition." Next, to construct a clearer picture of how Isocrates taught and how he developed his pedagogical practices, I examine Isocrates educational background and his unique ability to synthesize what he considers to be the most useful parts of previous and competing pedagogies. Unlike many of his predecessors, he did not view discourse simply as a technical competency, a way of conveying an already existing reality, or as an uncontrollable force. Instead, he understood speaking and writing to be practical ways of generating, organizing, and circulating ideas and of making judgments, which makes him an excellent model for us to emulate. I conclude by offering suggestions for applying Isocratean pedagogical practices in twenty-first century composition classrooms. I contend that students should be given more chances to produce and distribute discourses that might be read, considered, and acted upon outside the classroom, that explicitly attempt to contribute to and change what counts as knowledge, and that offer suggestions about what acts should be taken, what policies implemented, and what judgments made.