Beginning at a date difficult to fix precisely (at the end of the 7th or during the 6th century), Athens, in contrast to Sparta, became the first to renounce education oriented toward the future duties of the soldier. The Athenian citizen, of course, was always obliged, when necessary and capable, to fight for the fatherland, but the civil aspect of life and culture was predominant: armed combat was only a sport. The evolution of Athenian education reflected that of the city itself, which was moving toward increasing democratization—though it should be noted that the slave and the resident alien always remained excluded from the body politic. The Athenian democracy, even in its most complete form, attained in the 4th century bce was to remain always the way of life of a minority—about 10 to 15 percent, it is estimated, of the total population. Athenian culture continued to be oriented toward the noble life—that of the Homeric knight, minus the warrior aspect—and this orientation determined the practice of elegant sports. Some of these, such as horsemanship and hunting, always remained more or less the privilege of an aristocratic and wealthy elite; however, the various branches of athletics, originally reserved for the sons of the great families, became more and more widely practiced. Education of youth
Schools had begun to appear in those early centuries, probably on eastern Mediterranean models run by private teachers. The earliest references are, however, more recent. Herodotus mentions schools dating from 496 bce and Pausanias from 491 bce. The term used is didaskaleion (“a place for instruction”), while the generic term scholē, meaning leisure—a reference to schooling being the preserve of the wealthier sector—was also coming into use. There was no single institution; rather, each activity was carried out in a separate place. The young boy of privileged rank would be taken by a kind of chaperone, the paidagōgos, who was generally a respected slave within the parents’ household. The elements of literacy were taught by the writing master, known as a grammatistes, the child learning his letters and numbers by scratching them on a wax-coated wooden tablet with a stylus. More advanced formal literacy, chiefly in a study of the poets, playwrights, and historians, was given by the grammatikos, although this was restricted to the genuinely leisured. Supremely important was instruction in the mythopoeic legends of Hesiod and Homer, given by the lyre-playing kitharistes. In addition, all boys had to be instructed in physical and military activities in the wrestling school, known as the palaestra, itself part of the more comprehensive institution of the gymnasium.
The moral aspect of education was not neglected. The Athenian ideal was that of the kalos k’agathos, the “wise and good” man. The teachers were as much preoccupied with overseeing the child’s good conduct and the formation of his character as with directing his progress in the various subjects taught him. Poetry served to transmit all the traditional wisdom, which combined two currents: the ethic of the citizen expressed in the moralizing elegies of the 6th-century lawmaker Solon and the old Homeric ideal of the value of competition and heroic exploit. But this ideal equilibrium between the education of the body and that of the mind was interrupted before long as a result on the one hand of the development of professional sports and the exigencies of its specialization and on the other by the development of the strictly intellectual disciplines, which had made great progress since the time of the first philosophers of the 5th century bce. Higher education
A system of higher education open to all—to all, at any rate, who had the leisure and necessary money—emerged with the appearance of the Sophists, mostly foreign teachers who were contemporaries and adversaries of Socrates (c. 470–399 bce). Until then the higher forms of culture had retained an esoteric character, being transmitted by the master to a few chosen disciples—as in the first schools of medicine at Cnidus and at Cos—or within the framework of a religious confraternity involving initiate status. The Sophists proposed to meet a new need that was generally felt in Greek society—particularly in the most active cities, such as Athens, where political life had been intensively developed. Henceforth, participation in public affairs became the supreme occupation engaging the ambition of Greek man; it was no longer in athletics and elegant leisure activities that his valour, his desire to assert himself and to triumph, would find expression but rather in political action.
The Sophists, who were professional educators, introduced a form of higher education whose commercial success attested to and was promoted by its social utility and practical efficacy. They inaugurated the literary genre of the public lecture, which was to experience a long popularity. It was a teaching process that was oriented in an entirely realistic direction, education for political participation. The Sophists pretended neither to transmit nor to seek for the truth concerning man or existence; they offered simply an art of success in political life, which meant, above all, being able on every occasion to make one’s point of view prevail. Two principal disciplines constituted the program: the art of logical argument, or dialectic, and the art of persuasive speaking, or rhetoric—the two most flourishing humanistic sciences of antiquity. These disciplines the Sophists founded by distilling from experience their general principles and logical structures, thus making possible their transmission on a theoretical basis from master to pupil.
To the pedagogy of the Sophists there was opposed the activity of Socrates, who, as inheritor of the earlier aristocratic tradition, was alarmed by this radical utilitarianism. He doubted that virtue could be taught—especially for money, a degrading substance. An heir of the old sages of former times, Socrates held that the supreme ideal of man, and hence of education, was not the spirit of efficiency and power but the disinterested search for the absolute, for virtue—in short, for knowledge and understanding.
It was only at the beginning of the 4th century bce, however, that the principal types of Classical Greek higher education became organized on definitive lines. This was the result of the joint and rival efforts of two great educators: the philosopher Plato (c. 428–348/347), who opened his school—the Academy—probably in 387, and the orator Isocrates (436–338), who founded his school about 390.
PlatoPlato, marble portrait bust, from an original of the 4th century bce; in the Capitoline Museums, Rome.G. Dagli Orti—DeA Picture Library/Learning Pictures
Plato was descended from a long line of aristocrats and became the most distinguished of Socrates’ students. The indictment and execution of Socrates by what Plato considered an ignorant society turned him away from Athens and public life. After an absence of some 10 years, spent traveling the Mediterranean, he returned to Athens, where he founded a school near the grove dedicated to the early hero Acadēmos and hence known as the Academy. The select band of scholars who gathered there engaged in philosophical disputations in preparation for their role as leaders. Good government, Plato believed, would only come from an educated society in which kings are philosophers and philosophers are kings.
Plato’s literary dialogues provide a comprehensive picture of his approach to education. Basically, it was built around the study of dialectic (the skill of accurate verbal reasoning), the proper pursuit of which, he believed, enables misconceptions and confusions to be stripped away and the nature of underlying truth to be established. The ultimate educational quest, as revealed in the dialogues, is the search for the Good—that is, the ultimate idea that binds together all earthly existence.