This article examines a series of historical examples drawn from antiquity in order to describe some basic organisational parameters which have continued to inform modern concepts of teaching and learning. The author adopts an analytic method modelled on the work of the philosopher Luce Irigaray, in an effort to demonstrate how sexual difference has been routinely suppressed in the history of education. By examining the notion of citizen and the social and political conditions within which our notions of community were shaped in antiquity, it is argued that we can glimpse another perspective of teaching and learning that reveals the reliance upon public and private segmentations of social roles in the generation of educational concepts. The author seeks to disclose how certain binary relations, such as public-private, open-hidden, speech-silence have structured practices in teaching and learning throughout the Western tradition. (Contains 6 notes.)