This essay seeks to show that teaching and learning should be properly understood not as a project carried out according to the will of a higher power or party, but as a way of life with self-integrity arising from its own integral purposes. Thus the essay seeks to provide an understanding of educational practice and educational thought which contrasts in key respects with that by Alasdair MacIntyre’s, though it also have some notable parallels. A largely forgotten ‘Socrates of Athens’ is identified as furnishing the original inspirations for the understanding of education explored in the essay. Some influential modern (and postmodern) negations of this understanding are then reviewed. Arising from its investigation of teaching and learning as a singular kind of relationship, the essay concludes with a brief sketch of some virtues that might constitute the way of life in question in its more active and its more reflective moments.