Why Universities Use Socratic Dialogue

A university, as opposed to a technical school, does not just teach people a salable skill. Its goals are to teach the methods that lead to self-knowledge, critical thinking skills, citizenship defined in its broadest sense (meaning responsibility for one’s locality, state, nation, and globe), and literacy, which is the ability to read and write at a disciplinary level. These skills are essential for leadership in a Republic, Plato argued. By no means are these goals easy to achieve. There is no shortcut to achieving them.

Socratic dialogue is one of the primary methods we use at the university for achieving our goals. 2500 years ago, Socrates invented dialogue as it is still practiced at the university today. Socrates was identified by the oracles as the wisest man in ancient Greece. He was confused by this because he admitted that he knew nothing. How could he be the wisest man if he only knew that he did not know anything? He went to find out – what he discovered was that everyone else thought they knew something, but they had not examined their beliefs and when their beliefs were scrutinized, they fell apart. So Socrates was the wisest man because he didn’t hold on to beliefs that went unexamined.

One of our tenets at the university is “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That belief originated with Socrates. Dialogue was Socrates’ method for testing beliefs, his and others’. He intended dialog as a mutual search for the truth among lifelong friends who trusted one another and were willing to exchange views without embarrassing each other about it later. One of the questions raised in a famous Socratic dialogue – the Phaedrus – was: what is love? Furthermore, what’s the difference between “real” love and one love that’s not real? The dialogue participants exchanged their views with each other in much the same way that ritual clothing had been exchanged in the ancient Eleusinian Rites, which were used to break down and refashion identity categories. To participate in a Socratic dialogue, it doesn’t matter if you disagree with a particular view; you try it on and model it for others, and they model your views for you. You can make comments about others’ modeling of your views, indicating if the modeling is inaccurate, but in principle you have to cede control.

Socrates frequently went outside the city gates for his dialogues. One of the reasons for this is that he knew that if people overheard the dialogue it could be embarrassing for the participants. At modern universities, we can’t go outside the city gates very easily with thousands of students, so we go inside the classroom. The classroom has to be a safer place to exchange views than any other place – safer than home, workplace, church – all places which demand that people stay within defined roles and where deviation from prescribed views may be met with ridicule. Dialogue is not debate and it’s not eristics – the clash of ideas – in which you hold onto your “truth” with everything you’ve got and try to defeat any opposing views.

The classroom is a liminal space, which means an “in-between” space where things are in a state of flux. When someone or something enters the classroom to play a part in a dialogue, he, she or it dissolves into pieces (not literally, but figuratively) and these pieces get recombined in different ways. You can’t have too many things in the liminal space that people don’t want to see transformed, because that destroys the process. Everything in a space must be allowed to become part of the dialogue, and thus the dialogue is very sensitive to the space.

Dialogue is very fragile indeed. It needs the proper conditions in order to work and it needs certain constraints, but if you try to apply the wrong constraints, it fails. For example, nationalist symbols that are permanent and officially sanctioned parts of the classroom could have a “chilling effect” on dialogue. Not because they actively censor the participants, but because it would mean that the state was visibly represented in the space of dialogue, to remind people people we are American or at least in America. Dialogue can’t be “in America” because the liminal space must be temporarily “outside America” for us to safely consider the values OF America.

The space of dialogue has to be temporarily free from control of national identity. This doesn’t mean it’s a free-for-all. Nationalist symbols on campus are fine in general, but there are some places where they may not be appropriate. They may be appropriate in common areas of college campuses or even in primary and some secondary school classrooms, as well as technical institutes, because the students there, generally, are not engaged in dialogue.