Socrates was born around 469 BCE in Athens to Sophroniscus, a stonemason, and Phaenarete, a midwife — a parentage he invoked memorably in describing his own intellectual practice as a form of maieutics, midwifery of the mind. He received the standard Athenian education in music, poetry, and gymnastics, and the oral tradition records his early interest in the natural philosophy of Anaxagoras, before he came to regard questions of cosmology as less urgent than questions of how human beings ought to live. He served with distinction as a hoplite soldier at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, demonstrating the physical endurance and moral courage that his philosophical conversations would later theorise. Unlike the Sophists who dominated Athenian intellectual life, Socrates charged no fees, kept no school, and left no written works; his teaching was conducted entirely in conversation — in the agora, at gymnasia, and at the homes of wealthy Athenians. Everything we know of his thought derives from the accounts of others: chiefly Plato, whose early dialogues are generally considered the most historically reliable portrait of the historical Socrates; Xenophon, whose more prosaic memoirs give a complementary if less philosophically dazzling picture; and Aristophanes, whose comedy The Clouds lampoons him as a natural philosopher and Sophist. In 399 BCE, at the age of seventy, Socrates was tried before a jury of approximately five hundred Athenian citizens on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth, convicted by a narrow majority, and executed by drinking hemlock — a death that became, through Plato's Phaedo, one of the most celebrated scenes in the history of moral philosophy.

The distinctive feature of Socratic education is the elenchus — the refutative method of questioning. Socrates typically begins a conversation by requesting a definition: “What is piety? What is courage? What is justice?” His interlocutor, usually a confident expert or public figure, offers what seems an obvious answer. Socrates then draws out the implications of that answer through a series of apparently simple questions, demonstrating through the interlocutor's own admissions that the definition is inconsistent, over-broad, or self-contradictory. The process culminates in aporia — the state of perplexity and intellectual disorientation in which one recognises that one does not, after all, know what one thought one knew. Far from being a failure, aporia is for Socrates the necessary beginning of genuine learning: it is only when one has been disabused of false confidence that real inquiry becomes possible. This method is fundamentally different from what many modern educators call “the Socratic method” — the use of questions to guide students toward a predetermined answer — and Socratic scholars have emphasised the distinction between an elenctic practice aimed at exposing ignorance and a directive practice aimed at confirming conclusions.

The Platonic dialogues situate Socratic education in a city whose traditional educational order was under pressure. The old paideia — the formation of character through immersion in Homer, through competitive physical training, and through the apprenticeship of young men to admired older citizens — was being challenged by the new market for intellectual training offered by the Sophists: teachers of rhetoric, argumentation, and the arts of influence who claimed to be able to make any argument, regardless of its truth, appear stronger than its opposite. Socrates was both associated with and fundamentally opposed to this Sophistic movement. He was associated with it because he too questioned traditional authority and engaged young men in unconventional conversations; he was opposed to it because he refused payment, disclaimed the possession of teachable knowledge, and cared exclusively about the truth. His trial can be read as the collision between an educational culture grounded in civic conformity and an educational practice committed to relentless critical examination.

In the Theaetetus, Socrates describes his educational practice through the metaphor of midwifery: just as his mother Phaenarete helped women bring to birth children they already carried, he helps his interlocutors bring to birth ideas that are latent within them. The teacher, on this account, does not deposit knowledge in an empty vessel but creates the conditions in which knowledge that the learner already possesses — however obscurely — can be drawn into consciousness and examined. This metaphor has been extraordinarily influential in the philosophy of education, providing a classical precedent for student-centred and discovery-based pedagogies, for Dewey's conception of education as the reconstruction of experience, and for Freire's critique of the banking model. It positions the educator's highest function not as transmission but as facilitation, and it implies that the truest teacher is one who makes herself unnecessary.

The extended argument with Thrasymachus in Book I of Plato's Republic — in which Thrasymachus insists that justice is simply the advantage of the stronger, and Socrates patiently dismantles this claim — dramatises a debate about education that goes to the heart of democratic politics. Thrasymachus' position is not merely an abstract philosophical thesis; it is the practical creed of Sophistic education, which aimed to equip students with the rhetorical tools to succeed in a competitive political world regardless of whether their causes were just. Socrates' counter-argument — that the soul of the rhetorician who argues for injustice is thereby corrupted, that knowing the good is inseparable from doing the good — grounds his educational project in a conception of moral knowledge that has no equivalent in the Sophistic tradition. Education, for Socrates, is not the acquisition of techniques but the cultivation of the soul.

Socrates did not found a school, but the intellectual tradition he inaugurated gave rise directly to Plato's Academy and indirectly to Aristotle's Lyceum, and through them to much of the Western philosophical curriculum. His method of sustained critical questioning has been institutionalised in the Socratic seminar, the law school case method, and various forms of philosophical inquiry with children (P4C) developed by Matthew Lipman. The figures of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. — both of whom cultivated practices of public reasoning and moral witness in the face of unjust power — have been read as standing in the Socratic tradition of the public intellectual who accepts personal risk in the service of truth. Socrates remains the defining symbol of the proposition that education is not socialisation into existing norms but the ongoing, uncomfortable, and irreplaceable practice of asking whether those norms can withstand examination.

Socrates left no written works. His thought is known through the writings of his students and contemporaries, principally:

• Plato's early dialogues: Apology, Euthyphro, Crito, Meno, Protagoras, Gorgias, Republic (Book I), Theaetetus
• Xenophon's Memorabilia, Apology of Socrates, Symposium