Education in ancient Greece, whose undeniable success is amply demonstrated by the creativity in all fields of knowledge and art, was, above all, about preparing young people for the high places of public life: politics, the judiciary and education itself. If it is not, therefore, a formula that can be copied in the instruction of the masses in general, and if today it would be utopian to try to imitate it even for the formation of the ruling class, of politicians, business leaders, military commanders, bishops and cardinals, it remains, however, an excellent model for the education of the intellectual elite.



I do not pretend that it is possible or even desirable to set up a school, much less a national education system, according to the Greek format. It is not in this sense that I use the word “model”. I use it to designate only one unit of comparison and measurement that can serve for personal guidance, whether for some educators, for parents interested in homeschooling, or for students devoted to educating themselves or re-educating themselves.



Given this limitation, the first thing that should call our attention is the absolute priority that, in early childhood education, was given to literary and artistic training. After the basic moral instruction given by domestic education, practically all that was taught to children, as soon as they were literate, was to read and decorate the works of great poets, participate in theatrical performances, sing, dance and do gymnastics. That was all. The rest each learned by themselves or with private teachers.


Here’s how Plato describes this process:


“When students learn to read and begin to understand what is written, just as they did before with sounds, they are given to read on their stools the works of good [epic] poets, which they are obliged to memorize; works full of moral precepts, with many narratives of praise and glory from the illustrious men of the past, so that the boy will imitate them by emulation and strive to look like them… After having learned to play the zither, they make us to study the creations of other great poets, the lyrical ones, to which they accompany the lyre, thus working so that the boys’ souls take control of the rhythms and harmony, so that they become softer and, because they are more rhythmic and harmonious, become equally apt for both word and action. For, throughout its course, man’s life needs cadence and harmony. Then, the parents hand them over to the gym teacher, so that their bodies are better able to serve the virtuous spirit, without being forced, by weakness of constitution, to reveal cowardice, both in war and in similar situations..”


In her densely documented book, Arts Libéraux et Philosophie dans la Pensée Antique (Paris, Vrin, 2005), the German-French scholar Ilsetraut Hadot adds:


“Young people from wealthy families also received, this time for free, a complementary education taking part in a tragic or lyrical chorus, on the occasion of local cultural festivals. These demonstrations were often the first representations of a play or lyric poetry by a contemporary author; they were therefore an opportunity for young people to be brought into contact with all the new literary creations of their time and to learn them by heart. This kind of education was so important, that Plato, in the Laws (II, 654 ab), finds himself led to identify the cultured man (pepaidymênos) with the one who participated in a choir frequently enough (ikanos kekoreykôta) and, on the contrary, the man without culture with the one who was never part of a choir (akôreytos).”


There is no exaggeration in saying that young Greeks, long before entering public life, already had a literary culture superior to the average of our current Literature teachers.


The preparation for citizenship only started after the stage of school education ended:


“When they leave school, the city, for its part, obliges them to learn laws and to take them as a paradigm of conduct, so that they do not get carried away by fantasy and practice some wrongdoing.”


This has been the case since before the advent of sophists, traveling teachers who went from city to city teaching the art of public speaking and public debate. The sophists introduced these subjects to the education of students who already came not only with a good literary and artistic base, but with some knowledge of the laws and principles that governed social life, knowledge of which the sophist was just a more advanced technical complement.

Plato approved the training of young people in the technique of debates, but he felt that the way in which the sophists taught it risked corrupting the students, addicting them to contest anything and everything and making them empty arguers who, confident in the unlimited power of refutation, they ended up not believing anything anymore. They became cynical contestants and amoral careerists:



“The very young, when they take a liking to arguments, use them as a game, always resorting to them with an aim of controversy, and, like those who completely refuted them, they will refute others themselves, obtaining pleasure, like new puppies, in pulling and tearing us with arguments, every time we approach them… When, however, they have refuted a large number of people and a large number of people have refuted them with a brutal and rapid fall, here they are arriving not to believe any more of what they believed in before. Now, the older man will not consent to take part in this delusion, but will rather imitate the one who consents to dialogue and seek the truth, instead of imitating the one who, in the controversy, play a game for the pleasure of playing.“ (The Republic, VII, 539 b2-c8.)


The art of making discussion a method for investigating the truth, instead of a simple game or a way of rising in life, was what Socrates introduced into Greek education and which Plato perfected under the name of dialectic.


The public that went to Socrates to learn this art was not, therefore, children or adolescents, but young adults and even not so young people who had already gone through the first two stages of Greek education: literary and artistic training and training for public discussions. With Socrates they learned a type of discussion in which it was no longer a matter of defeating an opponent, but of confronting different and conflicting ideas and hypotheses in order to find the common principles that gave the reason for all of them and thus they took a step forward towards the truth of the object discussed. This exercise was so unrelated to the search for sophistical victories, that it could be carried out in groups or individually, both out loud and in thought.


Aristotle appreciated the Socratic-Platonic dialectic and used it abundantly in his philosophical investigations, even considering it the only viable scientific instrument in new and unexplored subjects, where there is no general principle or premise and it is a matter of seeking them for the first time. The Aristotelian systematization of dialectics in the book of Topics has historically been the first general formulation of what would later be called the “scientific method”.


But Aristotle found that at the bottom of dialectical confrontations there was an underlying, unformulated criterion for measuring the coherence of discourses. Every dialectical discussion aimed at finding the premises, the founding principles for the study of this or that question, premises or principles from which valid conclusions could then be drawn. On the one hand, however, dialectics had no way of distinguishing whether these premises were true or just more reasonable than those from which the discussion had started. On the other hand, the whole dialectical effort was guided by an ideal of discursive coherence that the dialectic itself did not quite explain.


What Aristotle did was to make explicit the demands contained in that ideal and to formulate the set of rules that had to be followed to achieve it. It was this art that he called analytical, later called “logic”.


Aristotle taught this art at the Lyceum, the school he founded and which was a kind of specialized upgrade of the Platonic Academy. The students who came to learn logic from him arrived, therefore, with all the preparation they had received in the previous three stages: literary and artistic training, sophistry training for public discussions and Socratic-Platonic dialectic.


This brief narrative shows that both the history of the evolution of Greek education and the gradation of the stages of learning followed by each new student already contained, implicitly and in practice, the scale of the degrees of credibility that Aristotle would formulate in the succession of the poetic, rhetorical, dialectical and logical-analytical.

This coincidence of scalarity between the historical evolution of a culture and the structure of the stages of learning in each student suggests that the internal order of Greek education is indeed an ideal model, in the sense in which he suggested above.


Wherever a capable intellectual and ruling class has emerged, capable of the highest tasks of intelligence and political life, the education that prepared it has broadly followed the Greek model. The British colonial administration is an example. The almost entire series of American presidents is another. From the moment that schools neglect the transmission of universal and permanent values and fall into the sparse of wanting to infuse children with the cult of what is more recent and transitory — under the pompous name of “advanced achievements of science and technology” or any other — the result is always decay, barbarism, generalized stupidity. American education is the clearest example.