This book examines the role of teaching within public education. It critiques its function in today's educational policies and theories and establishes an alternative way of understanding teaching. It explores teaching from within a Sophist tradition of educational practice and thought.

The first part of the book discusses the vital link between public education and democracy, the shifts in schooling's role in fostering competition and comparisons at the cost of social responsibility and democratisation. It identifies the driving force of those shifts as forces of aggression...