Lecture vs. Discussion

Put down the dialogue, Socrates

“Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and examine others themselves; there are plenty of persons, as they soon enough discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing.” Socrates in Plato’s Apology (trans. Jowett).

One of the most prominent features of many schools is their emphasis on “discussion.” Sometimes you will also see them advertise “Socratic discussion” or even just “discussion” as a part of their classroom dynamic.

It is presented to parents and prospective students as an unqualified good, justified because it forces “active engagement with Ideas” and forces students to “wrestle with the text.” It sounds like a good idea, for sure.

But what does it mean?

I will first explain what Socratic dialogue is in its original context, and then touch on the current debate of “lecture” vs. “discussion-based” classes. The reason I am discussing this topic now is because of my previous post about our “world picture” and our understanding of learning might be one of the biggest problems when we argue about the merits of "lecture” vs. “discussion.”

This debate, however, has relevance to educational theory now because so many classical colleges and grade schools proudly advertise their “discussion” classes, while a sizeable contingent of educational theorists in other foxholes are arguing that lecture is preferable to discussion, or at least, that lecture and discussion should be held in a proper balance. But what is the balance?

I don’t think I will settle that debate here, but I might add a sprinkling more context to help us understand what’s going on in this debate. My main concern, as always, is the underlying principle of any topic.

So what is going on with “dialogue?” Especially “Socratic” dialogue?

Here is what we generally mean when we think of “Socratic dialogue” in the 21st century classroom.

The teacher presents the students with a question and asks them to provide feedback: their reactions to an idea, their responses, opinions etc. Then the teacher proceeds to question the students’ responses. This goes back and forth until perhaps the student has been forced to change his or her mind on a topic, or realize that they were wrong about something, or didn’t know as much as they thought they did.

This is not a bad practice, generally speaking. Some of this kind of dynamic can certainly be necessary in some contexts, with some age groups, and with some topics. However, it should not necessarily be advertised as an unqualified good either or the sole mode of operation in a classroom. As with all things, it must be held in proper balance with other things. Nor is it necessarily a pathway to knowledge per se. More often, it’s a pathway into the conclusions that the teacher wants you to have.

How did Socrates himself use “Socratic dialogue?” If you read a lot of Plato, you might notice that the most prominent pattern when it comes to who has this weapon unleashed on them: it’s the self-proclaimed “experts” in Athenian society who already claim to know everything about a topic. If you want a short introduction to this style of dialogue, read the Euthyphro or the Ion for fairly accessible entry points into this kind of dialogue. Socrates challenges two men who both claim to be experts on their respective topics. In the case of Euthyphro, he’s a religious expert, and by asking innocent questions, Socrates demonstrates that he is profoundly ignorant and has simply not thought through everything related to his field (and consequently does not realize that no one has that kind of knowledge because of human limitations).

The same takes place in the Ion where eponymous character claims to be an expert on Homer and no other type of poetry, leading Socrates to question whether being a rhapsode (a singer of tales) is a divine gift or a learned skill. Ion is reduced to a blithering idiot and must admit that he doesn’t know.

This would be like the homeless guy on a street corner going into a university campus and questioning the professors on their fields and demonstrating that they know very little about their own fields.

Famously as well, Platonic dialogues never come to any firm conclusions about anything. They end in what is called aporia (ah-por-ee-a), that is, “impasse.”

Socrates engages in this type of dialogue not with the students who know themselves to be students, but primarily with the self-professed, self-aggrandizing experts and leaders. (And note that it eventually got Socrates executed by the Athenian government). Socrates certainly does question his students when they espouse commonly-held notions about things that happen to be wrong, but when he is speaking with his devoted followers, he engages in long, very beautiful passages of what we might call “lecture” for a large percentage of his longer dialogues.

In Plato’s Apology we learn that Socrates was named “the wisest man in the world” by the oracle at Delphi precisely because he knew his own ignorance, and his quest of asking questions and seeking out wisdom led him to recognize the depths of his own ignorance, fostering in him a humility that no one else had.

It is the one who knows himself to be ignorant who asks the questions. That is key. Being truly Socratic means the teacher starts with: “I don’t know.”

What it doesn’t mean is the teacher dunking on a bunch of ten year olds. And despite the claim that this style of teaching “engenders humility” in the students, what actually seems to happen is that the students quickly learn what their teacher wants to hear and become very adept at saying those things.

Again, I am not saying that “Socratic dialogue” per se is wrong or does not have its place in the classroom at times, but there is a dynamic present in Plato that we don’t pay very much attention to, and so it might be a misleading term to use. Socrates is quite gentle with those young men who profess to be his students and desire to learn from him, and Socrates is also extremely self-effacing and never once assumes the authority of “the teacher.”

This is one of the reasons why I have misgivings when teachers talk about how they use “Socratic dialogue” in the classroom. It misses the social dynamics that were present in Platonic dialogues. Most of these dialogues are not taking place in the 21st century classroom or anything resembling it, but in social situations amongst presumed equals or superiors: dinner parties, festivals, celebrations, and long walks.

The reason why “Socratic dialogue” works in Plato is because all the people that Socrates dismantles in true Socratic dialogue are his presumed social superiors, not 6th graders, or even high schoolers. His students were adults young men finished with formal education. These dialogues take place at dinner parties or drinking parties or on long walks in the city, or in prison. The reason why Socrates as a character “works” is because he has no social standing, no formal education, no pretentions and no authority, but he is good at asking questions. Every question begins with some variation of Socrates saying, “I don’t know but I would like to find out.”

The problem with trying to implement discussion (and then calling it “Socratic dialogue”) in the classroom is that there is a social dynamic present in the classroom not present in true dialogue. The teacher still retains authority and the student is supposed to be under the authority of the teacher, and while it is certainly not a bad thing inherently to invite the student into discussion of ideas, there is going to be a natural disparity in knowledge levels and social disparity in the way that a student responds to the questioning of the teacher. It is not a conversation between equals, which is partly why discussion can bear fruit when done well. It is a sharing and a dissection of knowledge between humans of equal standing. Socrates takes the so-called “experts” to task and exposes them for being just as ignorant as he professes to be, and therefore, equal.

There is an attempt to introduce that type of discussion in the college classroom while being guided by the teacher who can interject where necessary to direct the discussion of the students. This tends to be overemphasized as superior to “lecture based” classes, which are derided as being too “passive” when it comes to the acquisition of knowledge. Students are tempted to zone out and not pay attention, rather than engage, even with a good teacher (and certainly this is a hazard, especially in a societal environment like our present one where students generally don’t value knowledge). This accusation directed at lecture of course presumes that raw knowledge is of less value. It presumes (probably unintentionally) that a teacher explaining the importance of pre-Socratic philosophy and its effect on Plato is of inherently less value than the student sharing their uninformed “gut reaction” to Platonic philosophy presented to them in thin, watery English translations.

Teachers are merely people more advanced in the acquisition of knowledge who go back to bring other people along with them and point out landmarks and interesting things along the way. A teacher shouldn’t be the Wizard of Oz.

My main point is that discussion has its place, but we ought to consider carefully how we use it and when. It may be most appropriate for late high school, college, and graduate school, if it is used at all, and well after the students have spent more time in the humble acquisition of knowledge first, by teachers who are also willing to admit: “I don’t know.”

As learners (teachers and students alike) we need to know the context for important books before we read and discuss them and move towards deeper understanding. We need teachers who have learned more than us to share what they know before letting us go hog wild “discussing” a topic. We have to know something about it first, and that’s what a teacher is there to do: give you that knowledge.

One serious hazard of introducing discussion as THE central element of a classroom dynamic is that it deludes young students into thinking that their opinions and reactions to ideas matter more than they actually do. The net result of this is arrogant students who have no trouble “shooting their mouths off” about things of which they have no real knowledge because their “reaction” to an idea is what matters, not real knowledge. This explains at least 75% of the dynamics of the internet and the amplification of everyone’s “voice” online as equal, when in reality, some people are more qualified to speak on certain topics than others. Some people, for whatever reasons, are more reasonable than others. The illusion of the internet is that everyone is equally qualified to speak, even if they have absolutely no knowledge or understandng of the topic at hand.

I suspect it is an exceptionally rare teacher who can manage this dynamic in a classroom setting and not accidentally give this false impression to students. If the daily expectation is to provide a reaction to an idea, it inadverently makes the student the judge rather than the humble receiver of an idea.

This isn’t just a school problem. This is also a society-wide problem. It’s fairly easy to see that the internet is functionally one giant “discussion-based” classroom, and it’s easy enough to see that the tech platforms that host these discussions are acting to one degree or another like the teacher, injecting their input where they feel necessary.

“But our classrooms are different because we are Christians and we recognize proper authorities. And we don’t care about day-to-day things like the news, but about Good and True things.”

Perhaps.

The fact of the matter is that most of the things we study formally in school are written and conceived of by minds far greater than most of us will ever attain, even ideas that are wrong or disagreeable, and we ourselves are not the final arbiters of truth.

What made Socrates effective is that he had absolutely no claim to pretension or superor knowledge. He merely sought knowledge, and found out that most of the practicioners of knowledge in various fields in his own society were only pretending to know things when they actually didn’t.

The thing about acquiring knowledge is that you have to know that you don’t have it in order to acquire it.

A starving man knows he needs food. When is presented with food, he eats it and is satisfied. He receives it. A starving man receives the food into his system to satisfy his hunger, and isn’t inclined to have a food fight with his companions because he knows that he needs it. And when he has received the food into his sytem, it is absorbed and goes into building up his body in imperceptible ways. We know food nourishes us and builds us up but most of the time, we rarely physically see what the food has done for us.

Most proponents of the modern “Trivium” model (as I outlined here in this post) would say that that’s what the “grammar” stage is for: the receiving of the food stage. The grammar stage is for receiving information or “facts,” but the expectation is that you move onto the next stages of “logic” and “rhetoric” which presumes that then you have moved onto “expressing” the data that has been pumped into your brain during the grammar and logic stages.

In reality, these three aspects of the Trivium are actually just the three components of human communication which are always working in tandem at all times. The processes of eating, receiving nutrients from the food, and digesting are always operating in tandem. I will take this analogy no further.

One’s “grammar” education in antiquity meant the continual study and reception of literature because the presumed foundation of all human activity is actually language. This remains true today. Our present world revolves around computers and ergo coding “languages” that provide communication between devices. Is it a machine language? Yes. But it is language nonetheless. Mathematics is expressed between human beings as a language.

In that respect, we never move past the “Trivium” or any one part of the Trivium. The whole thing is our language.

Language is foundational to all human endeavor. Furthermore, language and knowledge are inseparable components of one another. We cannot convey knowledge without language, and the way that knowledge is conveyed is going to be intimately connected to the language in which learning is taking place.

As when learning a new language, we ought to spend more time receiving information before we are able to communicate in the new language ourselves. We simply do not have the knowledge to communicate with other speakers of that language before we have received a certain amount of it. And that we should begin to engage actively with the new language is certainly not in question, but the real underlying principle I’m getting at here is that we must first receive the knowledge first, and also recognize that we will never fully master it, and must always be continually learning and improving.

The problem we have now in the ordinary classroom is that there is a general dearth of knowledge being shared in the first place. The current obsession with making everything into a “discussion” is a broader symptom of the fact that fewer and fewer people have genuine knowledge to share. It’s no mystery that our universities are not producing real knowledge, by and large. We all complain about it; you can find endless articles complaining about it in various ways. University graduates know less now than they did fifty years ago in general. High school graduates are demonstrating less general knowledge than ever.

We are attempting, as products of the modern public education system, to enter into an intellectual world that we are ill-equipped to enter. If we consider the intellectual world of men like Thomas Jefferson (considering everything about his character: good, bad, and ugly) we are still pea-brains in comparison. We simply do not exist in that world, and we are trying to crawl into it through a pinhole.

So here’s the real crux of the matter: are we aware of how much we don’t know?

Generally speaking, no. We think we know more because we have technology and more general knowledge about science and outer space and medicine. But in reality, most of us do not have an active command over any of those fields except in very narrow, limited ways. Just being vaguely aware of the vastness of outer space doesn’t make you an astrophysicist. Just being vaguely aware of basic nutritional principles and first aid doesn’t make you a doctor or a medical researcher. Being vaguely aware of a lot of things doesn’t make you a polymath. Most of us never progress beyond “vaguely aware” of a lot of things. We might have some knowledge of a handful of things, but most of us are not polymathic.

The biochemist is an expert in a very narrow region of knowledge. The astrophysicist and the linguist likewise. Our emphasis in education is on hyperspecialization rather than encompassing knowledge and deep thinking. That emphasis we currently have has made us unable to cope with the breadth of knowledge that our intellectual forebears possessed.

We might be tempted to use “discussion” as a way to cover up the fact that we ourselves do not know, and do not have the humility to admit it.

Because if we’re really honest with ourselves, we will never move out of the “receiving” phase of acquiring knowledge. There are always new frontiers for us as individuals who read and think. There are always new depths we can reach, and there should always be an attitude of humility first, especially with teachers who have been placed in authority.

And that’s what real Socratic dialogue stems from: humility. Socrates didn’t see himself as a guru or an authority on anything. Neither should we. Those of us who teach should be doubly careful, especially if we are deluding students into thinking they are the arbiters of the truth. If we present the ideas of Marx to them in the classroom and elicit scorn and scoffing from them because they’ve all been taught that communism is bad and should be mocked, that’s not the same as real knowledge. That’s just programming. That’s not honest interaction with Marxism. Nor is it communicating to the students the context in which Marx was writing and why his ideas are compelling to so many people. Students need to understand why Marxism is compelling to others, even if they do not agree with it. A teacher who has learned about Marxism might be able to explain that to them, and then the discussion of the underlying ideas may be more fruitful.

If we want to be truly “Socratic,” we should remember that Socrates assumes the role of teacher without ever claiming it for himself. He never sets himself up as a teacher, in fact he contrasts himself to some of the Sophists who had done just that and were acting like self-important gurus. His students learned most from his humility and his questions.

If we are going to be truly “Socratic” in the classroom, we do need to be willing to learn and to pass knowledge onto our students. Students need context before they can start “wrestling” with books. They need to know historical circumstances. They need to know what sorts of ideas were current at the time that a particular book was being written. If we don’t know that ourselves as teachers, then we need to stop trying to teach, or making the students do the teaching for us.

They need to know the “rules of the game” which the teacher must explain to them before they can start playing. The way a lot of “discussion” classes are taught, the students are given a game and told that they have to argue with each other into figuring out what the rules are before they can even start playing.

You wouldn’t bring a chess set into a classroom, divide the room into teams, and then tell them to figure out the rules by themselves. You would explain the rules to them first and then set them playing the game. Presumably you the teacher have been taught how to play the game first and are passing that on to the next generation.

The world of the mind, the intellect, our intellectual history and the languages of our heritage are things that we cannot make the students wrestle themselves into. These things must be taught to them first before they can be told to discuss or “actively engage” with them. These things must also be taught in the spirit of humility.

We don’t know it all. We are trying to resuscitate something largely lost to us, and something that we can never hope to equal. In attempting to recapture the “classical” idea, we have been playing Candyland on a chess board, utterly unaware of how silly we look.

The only antidote is real, deep knowledge. This is difficult to suggest, especially to teachers who are overworked and underpaid and abused by the school systems as they currently exist, especially classical school teachers. They do not have the time to study as much as they would probably like, especially if they are coming from other types of educational systems. They also have families and other obligations. They operate in a culture that is largely hostile to this type of learning.

So maybe we are being overly ambitious in what we expect from our schools and students and teachers. Wouldn’t it be better and of more lasting value if we did away with the pretentions that we are somehow equal to (or better than) the past? If we modeled humility instead? What if we said: “we don’t know nearly as much as we ought to or would like, but let’s make a small start.” There might be fewer arrogant jackasses who graduate from these schools, and that would certainly be worthwhile.

True Socratic dialogue, true discussion, and true learning starts with this conviction: “I do not know.”

Lecture or discussion - both have their place and time. What’s more important is that either one begins with humility and a genuine love of learning.

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“I am a little world made cunningly
Of elements, and an angelic sprite;
But black sin hath betray'd to endless night
My world's both parts, and, O, both parts must die.
You which beyond that heaven which was most high
Have found new spheres, and of new land can write,
Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might
Drown my world with my weeping earnestly,
Or wash it if it must be drown'd no more.”

John Donne from Holy Sonnet 5.