Re: Alternatives to the Socratic Method
"Chris Lamb" <lamby@debian.org> writes:
> To elucidate, it was my understanding that the Socratic Method — at
> least as the term is used today — refers to one interlocutor asking a
> series of unfolding questions with the aim of leading another to reach a
> particular point of view.
I think the thing that most often bothers me about the Socratic Method is
not the method itself, but instead is problems of consent around how it's
deployed.
Asking a series of unfolding questions can be a powerful teaching
technique, but the underlying assumption is that someone is teaching and
someone else is learning. That, in turn, is a relationship that I think
should be consentual: the person who wants to learn should understand
that's what's going on and be actively agreeing to go through this
exercise in order to learn more.
If, instead, someone has a different opinion from someone else and wants
to persuade (which is not the same thing as teaching), but there's no
previously-agreed teaching relationship, diving into Socratic questioning
feels weirdly indirect and a bit presumptuous. I'd rather just state my
objection or different opinion up-front with an open offer to explain how
I arrived at it. Then the other person can choose to opt into a
(temporary) teaching relationship while I explain my thought process (if
it's complicated enough to warrant that much structure), and at that point
the Socratic Method may be great.
Usually when I find myself getting into that sort of Socratic dialogue, it
turns out that the other person already understood the first four or five
steps and going through the preliminaries was just sort of weird, and it
would have been better to just start at the end and back up only until we
find the point of disagreement.
--
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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