Remembrance of Things Past: A History of the Socratic Method in the United States

Abstract

The Socratic method is a common touchstone in conversations about classroom pedagogy, widely believed to enhance student engagement and promote critical thinking. Understood as the historical inheritance of antiquity, the method is generally accepted by teachers, administrators, and scholars as a legitimate approach to instruction.

As this article reveals, however, the Socratic method was not passed down from ancient Athens across continents and millennia. Instead, it was re‐created and reimagined by different groups of educators who were less concerned with establishing a consistent and specific meaning for the method than they were with using it to advance their own distinct agendas. Thus, while the Socratic method is commonly perceived as both identifiable and ancient, it is in reality a vaguely defined and relatively modern pedagogical concept—a fact that should give pause to educators presuming to employ it.

Notes

Notes

1. Assessing teacher perceptions of the Socratic method across different localities and levels of schooling is, of course, an impossible task. And given the breadth of the field, even an abundance of evidence is more anecdotal than definitive. Nevertheless, it is possible to say that praise for the Socratic method among educators is widespread. Such praise is perhaps most easily accessed and best illustrated in sources like school Web pages, many of which proudly lay a claim on the method, and which serve as a more effective proxy for teacher practice than, say, journal articles. Examples abound, but for illustrative examples from K–8, 9–12, undergraduate, and graduate education, see the following in the reference list: Spring Garden Waldorf School; Greece Central School District; Colorado State University; University of Chicago Law School. With specific regard to critical thinking, one need only search the Web for the phrases “Socratic method” and “critical thinking” to find a plethora of resources ranging from general descriptions of the method to more teacher‐oriented materials. For an example, see Lee College in the reference list.

2. See, for example, Aristotelicae Animadversiones, Dialecticae Partitiones, Institutiones Dialecticae, Scholae Dialecticae, and Dialectique. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (), Teachers’ problems and how to solve them: A handbook of educational history and practice, or, comparative pedagogy (Grantwood, NJ: Comparative Literature Press), 61.

3. Sturm was a German educator, Protestant reformer, and diplomat whose life spanned most of the 16th century. His work on course design, school management, and curricula were highly influential in Western Europe during the period, as well as beyond his death in 1589.

4. While this was the first text printed in the new world to mention a Socratic method, it is important to note that there was extensive circulation of books between New and Old England at the time. For more on this, see Thomas Goddard Wright’s () book Literary Culture in Early New England, 1620–1730 and David Hall’s () chapter, “The World of Print and Collective Mentality in Seventeenth‐Century New England” in New Directions in American Intellectual History.

5. For a more thorough account of this history, see Carl Kaestle (), Pillars of the Republic: Common Schools and American Society, 1780–1860.

6. In The Art of Living, Nehamas () argued that the elenchus could just as easily be used to prove a proposition as to refute it, and made the case that Plato’s literary motives led him to present Socratic questioning as a tool for revealing the ignorance of others. For Kraut’s () particular take, see “Comments on Gregory Vlastos, ‘The Socratic Elenchus.’”

7. For an in‐depth examination of this question, see Gary Alan Scott’s () edited volume, Does Socrates Have a Method? The chapters included in the work make the case that the techniques employed by Socrates were too diverse and too inconsistently portrayed by Plato (and others) to constitute a single “method.”