SOCRATIC EDUCATION

Socrates denies that he is a teacher, and the people he questions often deny that they have anything to learn from him. These denials are tinged with irony, of course, but they contain a grain of truth: Socratic education puts the responsibility for learning on the learner. Nothing is more important to this kind of education than the resources that learners bring to it: their experience, their conceptual and logical abilities, and their desire to know the truth. Still, Socrates is more teacher than he admits; he has firm beliefs himself about the rough outlines of knowledge and human virtue (his main subjects of inquiry); and he often questions people to bring them to see that they too must accept such beliefs, on pain of inconsistency with their deepest commitments.

Socrates speaks humbly enough, but his aim is not modest: it is to transform people’s lives by coaxing them into thinking as a philosopher thinks. And Plato, in writing about this, faces hard questions about the value of the education for which Socrates stands. Three salient features of Socratic education are illustrated in Plato’s work:

1. an emphasis on critical and consistent thinking;
2. a unique concept of teacherless education, contrasted with teaching both as it occurs in Athens and as it would occur in ideal circumstances;
3. the hope that education in philosophy has the potential to transform people’s lives for the better.

By “Socrates” I mean the character of that name in Plato’s dialogues, which are largely historical fiction.1 Socrates is famous for obscuring himself, his aims, and the state of his own knowledge by means of irony. On many points, readers are left to their own devices.

Some think Socrates truly finds himself without answers to his own questions and sincerely continues to seek them. Others hold that Socrates knows the answers, but conceals them, leaving hints accessible only to the most philosophical audiences. And there are positions in between as well. In Socrates, Plato has drawn a personality that consists largely in shifting screens of irony, and we can do little but ask which is the predominate mask that Socrates wears. In this essay I will not try to peer beneath that mask. I will take it that Socrates is serious when he says that he lacks the knowledge he seeks, and that because he lacks such knowledge he cannot be a teacher. That is why his method places the primary responsibility on the learner.


What, then, does Socrates do by way of education, for whom does he do it, and what is his aim in doing so? A large part of his work is critical and issues in refutations of his companions: “With what group do I belong?” asks Socrates on one occasion. “I am with those who would be pleased to be refuted if I should say anything that is not true, and pleased to be the refuter of anyone who should say anything that is not true—more
pleased, in fact, to be refuted than to refute. I think that’s a greater good, you see, insofar as it’s a greater good to be relieved of a great evil than to relieve another of the same” (Gorgias 458a). He is apparently willing to provide this service for anyone, regardless of age or level of education. His aim is to goad his companions into examining their beliefs and their lives, especially in relation to virtue or the good condition of the soul. During his trial, he tells how he would respond if ordered to change his way of life:
as long as I breathe and am able to do so, I will not cease to practice philosophy, exhorting you and charging anyone of you whom I happen to meet, with my usual words: “My very good friend, you belong to Athens, the greatest city and the one most famous for its power and cleverness; aren’t you ashamed that you are concerned to have as much money, fame, and honor as you can, while you are not concerned with true wisdom or the condition of your soul—that it be the best it can—and you do not give this a thought?” And if one of you disputes this and says he is concerned I will not immediately let him go or leave him, but I will question him and examine him and test him, and if I find that he does not possess virtue when he says he does, I shall reproach him for taking the most important subjects least seriously while giving more attention to trivia. These things I will do for anyone I meet, young or old, citizen or visitor…
(Apology 29de)

We do not find Socrates doing exactly this in early dialogues other than the Apology, but we have a report of this kind of Socratic education from the most famous of Socrates’ young companions—and one of the worst behaved. The effect was that the young man came to be ashamed of his life and to wish for improvement (Alcibiades, in Symposium 215a–216a).

What sort of improvement can come through Socratic education? We shall see that consistency as Socrates understands it requires high standards for knowledge claims, so that Socratic learners will be modest in what they claim to know. He also holds that a consistent and well-examined life will serve certain moral ideals, particularly the Socratic thesis that it is worse to do wrong than to suffer it (Crito 49ab).
Read More : SOCRATIC EDUCATION