Some thoughts from Chapter 3 of Norms & Nobility

It is only just to begin this post with David Hicks's chosen epigraph, so with that I shall begin.

Rigorous teachers seized my youth,

And purged its faith and trimmed its fire,

Showed me the high, white star of Truth,

Then bade me gaze and there aspire.

~Matthew Arnold

Now, to David Hicks.

"To begin with, [the Socratic teacher] possesses two outstanding traits. First, his temper and behavior are governed by ideas: his life maintains that perfect balance between thought and action, theory and practice that makes him seem to his students the very incarnation of his lessons. Second, he has a broad and penetrating curiosity and a delightfully dialectical mind, eager to devise and test a hypothesis, quick to challenge ideas and observations, but slow to accept an aitia (a first or final cause, an incontrovertible ground), even though, like Democritus, he would rather discover a first cause than be king of the Persians."

This idealized teacher, Hicks explains, is the opponent of the Sophists, who accepted the world of experiences and taught his students merely what do to do in order to "get along". He shows that, though the Sophists mocks the Socratic teacher for questioning appearances, only the Socratic teacher can save the appearances, who can save those appearances depth. He then goes on to portray the other idealized classical teacher - the Isocratic teacher. 

This teaching method is less dependent on the "idiosyncratic genius of the individual teacher", and it's goals are more practical and positive, but less philosophical. The Isocratic teacher "uses a great tradition of learning in the arts, letters, and sciences to excite in his students a vision of those enduring values and truths that underlie the world of appearances". And as his focus is different from that of the Socratic teacher, the Isocratic teacher has a different battle with different opponents. This opponent is, as Hicks terms it, "the romantic school of child psychology", the school which believes in the perfect child. They argue that childhood is a time for enjoyment, freedom, and entertainment; they do not "concern themselves with an ideal of how children ought to behave because they have no vision of what their students ought to be as adults".

The Isokratic teacher, on the other hand, recognizes "that children want to be brought up...The healthy child wants to become an adult, just as the mature adult wants to be an adult." Hicks goes on:

"Isokrates' avoidance of this romantic fallacy suggests, paradoxically, that he regarded education with the mind of a child. Of towering importance to the child are not the playful, innocent moments remembered by the adult who nears death, but the hard-won progress he makes as a child toward his image of adulthood. He measures his greatest achievements and most agonizing defeats against this image. When his teacher holds out to him only an image of how 12-year-olds ought to think and act, his hope of growth wavers, and he becomes restive and inattentive...Where Isokrates made demands of the child, the modern teacher seeks to make concessions."

Ask yourself, then, what sort of teacher you wish to be. The Sophist, or the Socrates? The Romantic, or the Isokrates?