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Comment by wdewind | Hacker News Reader

So I went to a high school which claimed to practice the "Socratic Method." Now I'm not saying it can't be used correctly, but in 90% of the cases it was used it was sticking us in a lab, showing us an experiment and asking us what happened, THEN having us do the reading. It makes NO sense and was a HUGE waste of time.

As a tool in your arsenal it's great, as the cornerpiece of your education system it's really not. People need to be shown what to do ultimately.

Finally, America is becoming "less creative" based purely on the judgment of two scientists (literally they look at the drawings and say "I give this one a 15/18"). Seems a little melodramatic/farfetched. I'd be the first to believe the hypothesis but what a stupid experiment.

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Socratic dialogue is completely different from the Socratic method (which I hadn't heard of before). Socratic dialogue is a way of getting a student to consider and answer their own questions during a conversation, where the teacher responds to the student by asking leading questions.

Your experience with the Socratic approach at your high school was probably spoiled by poor execution.

Doing the lab before reading the theory behind it can be an extremely effective approach to build real understanding of the nature of the experiment, and allows students to explore the very same thought process that the originators of the theory followed to transform their experience of reality into a useful conceptual model. If you've reached this point, the value of the textbook is only in learning the conventions of language and notation that are generally used to frame the idea.

But the whole approach requires an instructor who already has both the enthusiasm and the skill ask the right questions and lead students to their own intuitive understanding. If teachers are simply going through the motions and following a process without being fully engaged in the dialogue, the Socratic approach simply won't work.

Unfortunately, most public school teachers probably do not have the qualities that are needed to make it work.

Amen. I would say this article goes a fair bit towards explaining our lack of creativity. Newsweek? Fuck it. Read Unte Reader. At least you'll get a breadth of writing styles and topics. Creativity measuring is part of the problem, just ask why the lucky stiff, everybody's favorite accidental professor.

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