What Should a Well-Educated Person Know?
Why we fight so much about college
It’s good to be educated — pretty much everybody agrees on that. But what should an educated person have learned? That’s a more difficult question, and it’s at the heart of most of our arguments about education.
In ancient Athens, the best-educated people were drilled in public persuasion — a fitting skill for a society oriented around democratic politics. Wealthy families would hire tutors, otherwise known as sophists, who would train their sons in literature, dialectic, and rhetoric. The dialectical training would help them to outthink their political opponents and the rhetorical training would allow them to persuade the Athenian people of the correctness of their views. These eloquent aristocrats came to dominate the Athenian Assembly and steer the political life of their city-state.
A smaller group of Athenian educators, exemplified by Socrates and his pupil Plato, thought that the sophists were undignified. They trained their students to pursue the good and serve the city rather than their own political careers. But the building blocks of this education were much the same — students learned logical reasoning and persuasion.
Romans, influenced in this as in many things by the Greeks, also wanted their best-educated people to be ready for…
