When I linked to the experiment with Socratic questioning in a third grade class, I wondered aloud how it would fare with more advanced topics. True Story shares some actual experience:
If you’re interested to see how this would work with more advanced ideas, you ought to go sit in on any first-year class at a law school.
The answer, in my experience, is that it doesn’t work very well at all. Legal concepts are not like binary — or even like Socrates’ epistemological puzzles — because they aren’t intuitive, and often they aren’t even very logical. Sure, they have their own internal logical that you can discern once you know the parameters, so in some very particular instances Socratic questioning might actually lead a student to the right idea. But those cases are the exception.
By and large, Socratic Method is a terrible way to teach - in my experience, anyway.
I have no experience with law schools, so I can’t argue for or against this experience. I wouldn’t discount teaching by the Socratic method on that basis (alone), though. There are a couple of clues in the post as to what might be wrong. First of all, in the original article, there was a constant emphasis on the choice of subject: it must be highly logical, and you must be able to figure out questions that logically lead to the right conclusions for it. The article explicitly says:
It does not work for unrelated facts or for explaining conventions, such as the sounds of letters or the capitals of states whose capitals are more the result of historical accident than logical selection.
What is teaching law but explaining legal conventions? It isn’t like physics or math. These aren’t natural laws. Law does have its own logic, which lawyers must know how to navigate, and that does require intellect — I’m not saying this to imply that lawyers or law students are stupid or that legal matters are easy or make no sense. I have a hunch, which should be taken with the appropriate amount of salt, that when you go further than first year, there is more of the working inside the logic of law part and less of the rote learning of conventions and facts part. Maybe the Socratic method would be more suitable there. Maybe not. Maybe that’s a fault of the method, or maybe it just means the study of law isn’t particularly suited to it.
There’s also another clue in True Story’s post. The author says one reason this kind of teaching is prevalent in law schools is that it’s the easiest way to teach. But in the original article, it was made clear that this isn’t an easy method to teach (for the teacher). It requires hard thought to come up with the right kind of question — the kind that leads logically to the conclusion, thereby improving the students’ understanding instead of measuring his ability to read between the lines — and it requires quick thinking and spontaneity to be able to quickly turn around and get on the right track again if the students’ answers go astray.
You don’t get tenured at an Ivy League law school because you have a passion for teaching or a real commitment to your students. You get there because you are a brilliant legal thinker and you publish in the right journals and speak at the right lectures. Once you’re there, teaching is just that pesky thing you have to do twice a week in order to keep getting paid while you do research on your next book. Easiest way to get that obligation over with? Socratic Method.
If we are to believe the dialogs, Socrates was one of the few smartest people in the history of western civilization, and he dedicated his life to examining life and to leading other people to and through the same process. That can’t be expected from the average law professor, however brilliant they are. It certainly can’t be expected from someone not at all dedicated to or interested in teaching, who tries to take the easy way out. Socrates didn’t take the easy way out. The story of his trial is ample evidence of that.
This adds up to: maybe this counterexample isn’t such a great counterexample. On the other hand, maybe it is. Maybe it’s exactly what you would get if you tried applying this method to other fields. Maybe the experiment with binary and third graders was an anomaly. Seeing how I need to increasingly idealize conditions in order to defend the potential merits of this method for teaching makes me sad. That makes it clear that any enthusiasm must be guarded. I would want to study this way, but obviously only when it worked great, like in the example. A combination of the right subject, the right students, the right teacher and the right questions is clearly needed to make the winning cocktail here.
I don’t want to be paving any unfortunate roads with good intentions here.
