Education in the Greek antiquity: Socrates and Plato

Socrates: He declared that he did not know anything and that his aim in life was to learn, not
to teach something, nor to transmit knowledge. For the Greeks of his time, Socrates was a
sophist. However, he differed from them in many respects.

• First, he did not really have pupils since he never gave lessons: as he knew nothing, he
transmitted nothing .

• Second, he did not ask for any salary when he talked to young people.

• Moreover, the sophists were his adversaries. He criticized them all the time, not in their
absence, but in their presence in a dialogue exchange.

• Finally, in his numerous discussions, he wanted more to learn than to teach. He inverted thus
the role of the sophist by becoming the pupil of his pupils.

Socrates was a man of dialogue. He liked to talk to young people particularly, but also to great
sophist teachers, nobles, soldiers, ordinary citizens; in short, to everyone. He was interested in
what people thought they knew, in their certainties, beliefs, ideas, knowledge. His method
was called maieutics, which is an art of dialogue. It consisted of discussing with others, letting
them express their own ideas and asking them questions about the meaning and definition of
the notions they use. Socrates was the first to understand the necessity of defining the words
people used in order to arrive to an agreement. He is the inventor of definition. Thus he
obliged people to think by themselves, rather than to repeat ready-made ideas, prejudices and
traditional beliefs. The aim of maieutics is therefore to lead people to use their minds and to
discover Truth by themselves. Socrates emphasized the search for Truth rather than the
accumulation of knowledge.

The contribution of Socrates to the history of education consists of fostering the idea that
education is not a process of transmitting or imposing a content or a norm. It is rather a
process of training within which the learner is required to assume his own thoughts, his
convictions and life orientations by using his mind. According to Socratic philosophy,
education is related to the idea of discussions without violence during which the participants
expose their respective points of view by using arguments that are susceptible of persuading
the participants. For Socrates, discussion is not only a means of education. It is at the same
time the means by which education is produced and the objective of training, which is
equivalent to the acquisition of a 'discursive competence'.

• For the sophists, being educated means to know how to speak, how to argue.

• For Socrates, being educated means to know how to develop logical argumentations to
convince others' of one's point of view.

• Therefore, the Greek philosophers did not really develop a child pedagogy, since for them
real education started only when a person is mature enough to talk and to think autonomously.
Plato: He was Socrates' disciple. Socrates was condemned to suicide for political reasons. His
death was a major event for Plato in the sense that it represented the failure, not of the
Socratic message itself, but of his method, his education. What was the use of calling to
reason and discussion if people kill or commit violent acts? Thus, Plato thought that it was
necessary to go beyond discussion and to propose a more powerful education capable of
deeply transforming men, and not only their discourse.

For Plato, true education (which is philosophy itself) is a substitute to policy. In front of a
political situation dominated by violence and contradictions, Plato considered education as a
means to get out of the political crisis and to re-make human society. Plato is therefore an
utopist: he wanted to re-make the world by means of a new education. His utopia, like all
utopias, is based on education. Its aim was to completely re-make man and to shape him right
from childhood. For utopists, the child constitutes the road towards the new man. He is the
future of man. To achieve this objective, Plato proposed a pedagogy based on a long learning
process, made of a series of passages through different degrees of knowledge. This process
starts in adolescence through to adulthood.

His education is based on a meritocratic ideology. All adolescents without distinction (rich or
poor, boys or girls) undergo the same training, type of education. At the end of this long
educational process, these children will be gradually distinguished thanks to their natural
merits. They will thus constitute the three components of the society: some will be workers
and peasants, others guards (or soldiers) and a minority will be philosophers.