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.