Educational philosophy began in the Greek classical period with the examination of the educational

claims of the sophists undertaken by Socrates. The sophists brought higher education to the
democratized Athens of the fifth and fourth centuries bc, offering those who aspired to political
leadership a training in political aretē (the goodness, excellence or virtue required for success in
pursuing appropriate ends) or phronēsis (sound judgment or practical wisdom) (see Aretē; Sophists).
This form of education suggested that most citizens lacked the virtue and judgment required for a life in
public affairs, and one can detect a concession to the political dangerousness of this in the claims of
Protagoras that cities and their citizens do indeed teach virtue to the young, but that his own teaching
could refine and develop it by degrees. In Plato’s Protagoras, Socrates exposes the tensions in this view
by distinguishing between the habitual virtue of good or obedient citizens, and true virtue which
involves intellectual insight and sound judgment (that is, phronēsis), noting that a skill which merely
refines and enlarges the former cannot yield the latter.

More generally, the Socratic response to the sophists was above all cautionary. As we encounter
Socrates in the Protagoras and other early dialogues of Plato, he dedicated himself to showing through
his method of questioning (elenchus) that those who claimed to be teachers of aretē lacked the expert
knowledge of it which its teaching would require. The possession of such knowledge would allow one to
defend and explain the truths one believes through a reasoned account (aitias logismos), and Socrates
denied that he was himself a teacher, apparently on the grounds that he was unable to give such an
account of his own beliefs. He advocated the individual care of one’s own soul, and embraced an ethic
of justice, wisdom and self-restraint, in opposition to the competitive ethic of the warrior heroes
portrayed by Homer and embraced by Greek popular morality. How far he thought his own elenctic
method would carry one in this care of the soul, or in the search for the best way to live, is unclear (see
Socrates).

It offered an education designed to facilitate and promote success in public life. All of the Sophists
appear to have provided a training in rhetoric and in the art of speaking, and the Sophistic movement,
responsible for large advances in rhetorical theory, contributed greatly to the development of style in
oratory