ABSTRACT
The most famous teacher of the dialectic tradition was Socrates, who lived at the end of the 5th century BC in Athens. Greek higher education consisted in learning the liberal arts. The liberal arts, or at least some of them, were taught in Isocrates's and Plato's schools. Starting with Socrates and perhaps even before him the ancient Greeks already distinguished between formative learning and plain acquisition of knowledge. Plato presents a utopian design for maintaining the stability of society with an educational plan that is reserved to the upper classes. The efforts required to maintain the society's stability should have fallen almost entirely on the shoulders of the philosophers and the warriors. In the Socratic method, knowledge grows through continuous dialectical interaction, in which the teacher also accepts a passive role and the pupil may assume an active role. The goal of the Platonic social program is to maintain social stability.
