ABSTRACT
The origin of educational philosophy as an academic discipline is hard to determine. More than anything else, the evidence suggests, the spur to a Greek intellectual investment in educational philosophy, although at the outset not as an independent study, was political necessity. Plato was educational philosophy's first architect. Plato heads the list but Isocrates and the Sophists are on it too, although their contribution to educational philosophy is dwarfed by Plato's monumental stature. With a large portrait of educational purpose before him, Zeno was careful to adopt a central principle in Hellenistic educational philosophy regularly giving primacy of place to moral formation. Toward the end of the Hellenistic period, probably as late as the first decades of the third century a.d., educational philosophy was able to stand alone as a subject worth the attention of good minds. Roman educational practice and theory owed a huge debt to the Hellenists.
