Comment by gaelenh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaelenh | Hacker News Reader

There was a relatively recent article in Time about the socratic method not being so great: http://ideas.time.com/2011/12/14/why-asking-questions-might-...

Basically, they recreated one of Socrates' lessons. The students gave similar answers to the 50 questions, but only half figured out the task at the end of the lesson. The students didn't understand the importance or goals of the questions and answers.

That's not to say the socratic method doesn't work. If you read enough research and anecdotal stories about education, you'll come to realize that everything works and nothing works. For every idea in education, research will eventually show that it is ineffective and a waste of time and resources.

So the students were fed the original 50 questions from Socrates dialog... This is very different from the Socratic method as I understand it, which relies not on a static set of questions, but on the interactions between the teacher and the audience. That the students answers to the 50 questions were similar the answers in Socrates' dialog is not enough.

A static list of questions is just an ordinary lecture, reworded. The OP's article shows how precious the Socratic method is in giving you an immediate feedback from the students. In this sense it is crucial that questions are formulated based on the previous answers.

The author does that in the article: prepared questions are important to guide the general line of reasoning, but improvised questions are just as important to navigate along this line.

> So the students were fed the original 50 questions from Socrates dialog... This is very different from the Socratic method as I understand it, which relies not on a static set of questions, but on the interactions between the teacher and the audience. That the students answers to the 50 questions were similar the answers in Socrates' dialog is not enough.

As Plato/Socrates wrote, the problem with books is that they can't talk back and react to you.

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