This article describes a book review assignment that is an application of enlightenment practices to a modern learning environment. This paper encourages both student learning in the content of enlightenment ideas and the methods of critical, accessible writing. Students engage in metacognition by using the critical reasoning capacities of their brains in the context of a contemporary education system, all made transparent through their engagement with eighteenth-century theories of cognition and education. Through their eighteenth-century book review paper, the students also engage in what might be termed "metacriticism" by participating in enlightenment styles of writing criticism in a critical thinking writing assignment in the contemporary classroom.