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 and destruction central to a neoliberal ideology. The second part of
the book argues for a practice of Sophistical teaching rather than Socratic teaching. It
explores in-depth what it could mean to be teaching in an up-to-date sophist tradition of
educational thought and practice. The book also includes insights for teaching to counter
aggressive forces of nationalism racism and late capitalism's violence and the escalating
climate crisis. Readers will be able to understand teaching within educational thought and
precisely how different teaching forms can contribute to education as democratisation.
