Do you believe in the socratic method in the teaching of children?

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It partly depends on what the method is supposed to be. In reading some of the Socratic dialogues, one gets the strong impression that it was a technique for walking the person being questioned into a pre-determined and sometimes peculiar answer. (Do we really think that Meno's slave boy had learned about triangles in his life before birth?) But the goals people claim to have in mind when they use the Socratic method are good ones: to encourage critical thinking, to get students to take ownership of their ideas, and to see that easy answers are often not forthcoming. Starting with a question -- especially a provocative one -- seems like a plausible way to get people thinking. But we all know that things with the grammatical form of questions can sometimes serve the same purpose as simply making a claim; sometimes it's not hard for students to pick up on the answer they're supposed to go for.

Perhaps the real question is what methods work best for getting people to be critical thinkers. That's a question that's partly empirical, and there are psychologists (Jonathon Baron, for instance) who've written about it. Perhaps one of the best things we can do for our students, with due regard to what works at what age, is to encourage them to develop what Baron calls "active open-mindedness" (the willingness to look for alternatives to one's own preferred view and consider them openly but critically) and to avoid the corresponding vice of "myside bias." If some form of Socratic questioning serves this purpose, then it will be a useful pedagogical tool. But the goal is more important than the technique.

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