Isocrates- What a Teacher Should/Shouldn’t be

In Against the Sophists, Isocrates attacks the Sophists and their teaching of Rhetoric. One of his main concerns is that the Sophists are not actually teaches, but people who teach gimmicks and not actual material. They often teach to those who are not naturally gifted, so how could those people really be becoming smarter? Concerning teachers he says, “But I marvel when I observe these men setting themselves up as instructors of youth who cannot see that they are applying the analogy of an art with hard and fast rules to a creative process” (Isocrates 171). By this he means that a teacher should not be teaching a process, they should be teaching in order to make their students smarter. Concerning what kind of person a teacher should be, he mentions,  “the teacher, for his part, must so expound the principles of the art mth the utmost possible exactness as to leave out nothing that can be taught, he must in himself set such an example of oratory that the students who have taken form under his instruction and are able to pattern after him” (175).  He believes that teachers must be the utmost example of what they teach, they must be naturally gifted at what they do so as to set an example.