This study offers a theoretical context for reading political education literature. Comparing the two classical cultural exemplars (Latin/Greek) we build our working framework upon the firm distinction between Republican and Democratic ideals and we suggest that the current political culture is shaped into the Republican mold. Setting these findings as our conceptual framework, we scrutinize the 2018's democratic education proposal of the Council of Europe, which although represents modern Republican states, it rather employs concepts--participation, living-together, ethical competencies--extracted from the Democratic exemplar. Finally, we assess the effectiveness of our framework and the coherence of the CoE's text.