Rhetoric and education have a lot of common grounds and share many similarities; however, since education is the basis and foundation for rhetoric, rhetoric cannot exist without education. The most significant connection between rhetoric and education is that they both are basic elements of human life; they both empower humans with essential knowledge and give quality to human life. Without education and rhetoric, humans are nothing but walking corpses who are blind to the world they live in and are confined in the dark chambers of ignorance. Today, in our society, there is a significant emphasis on getting education, however, rhetoric is only learned and practiced by a few. In this essay, rhetoric and education will each be explained in details. What is rhetoric and what does it mean to be a rhetorician? .
There are many definitions for rhetoric, but in accordance with the ancient Greek philosophy, rhetoric is the art of persuasion, and a rhetorician is one who makes the profession of using rhetoric. Now the question of "what kind of a persuasion does rhetoric artifice" may arise as "persuasion" can have many various types of effects on an audience. Socrates in "Plato Gorgias" says, "And if anyone asks of us what sort of persuasion, and about what, - we shall answer, persuasion which teaches the quantity of odd and even" (483). Furthermore, Gorgias, a Sicilian rhetorician who was a successful Sophist in Athens (376–483 BCE), in a dialogue with Socrates, states that rhetoric is an art that is mostly used in courts of law and other assemblies about the just and unjust. (484). However, Aristotle, a well-known Greek philosopher, has a different view about rhetoric; he suggests that rhetoric is the counterpart of dialectic; that both can have similar functions. (490). He further claims that both of them evenly belong to no definite science and come within the general understanding of human beings.
