The title suggests a number of paradoxes. The concept of the “teaching machine” represents, on the one hand, one of the most revolutionary and challenging concepts facing teachers and educators today and, at the same time, looks back to one of the oldest basic psychological concepts of learning within the history of educational theory. Socrates' instruction of the slave boy in the Meno is perfect and persuasive illustration of the system of question-response basic to the efficacy of the modern teaching machine. Socrates, as we know, sought to persuade Meno that the slave boy's knowledge of a mathematical fact came not from teaching, but from questioning, and ultimately from recovery of innate knowledge.