Socratic method enjoyed renewed attention from three different sources. John Dewey was effective
in changing the emphasis on student-centered instruction. Law schools took up Socrates’example
to increase the effectiveness of legal training. A movement to restore general education and the
Great Books resulted in the emergence of an updated“Socratic seminar”setting.
This history of education approach is useful for thinking about broad trends. It does not, however,
provide a full account of the reasons why the Socratic method was transformed in America by
leading intellectual and educational reformers. The Americanization process includes a number of
cultural-historical factors, not generally accounted for in educational history, such as religion,
democracy, and practical culture–factors that Hofstadter famously led to an“unpopularity of the
intellect”in the United States. A brief look at these factors will help to clarify why the Socratic
method could never be embraced wholeheartedly in the United States, at least not in its original
unadulterated form.
Socrates and the American Character
When Tocqueville arrived in the United States, he made a few remarkable observations on the
peculiar character–or problem–of American education. Religion, history, and commerce, he said,
had created a social environment that was unfriendly to abstract and time-consuming styles of
learning. Circumstances had conspired“to divert [the American] mind from the pursuit of science,
literature and the arts:::and to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects.”For
Tocqueville, there had always been an“earthward”pull in American intellectual life. American
education was grounded historically and materially in an habitual preference for the useful over the
beautiful; as Tocqueville famously put it, even“the beautiful should be useful.”^5
Tocqueville’s observation of the cultural setting of American education is a useful starting point
for thinking about the Americanization of Socrates. American life, he observed, was characterized
by constant action, and circumscribed by democratic politics. American life was also highly restless
and commercial, a fact which necessarily changed the character of American education. In contrast
to many European schools, American educators put a premium on practical education, or on the
“rough and ready habits of mind.”
The relevant part of Tocqueville’s insight was his observation that American education was
essentially pragmatic. The American regime favors quick thinking and decisive, often risky, action.
Personal or individual success in the United States does not depend on perfection, theoretical
clarity, or even doxastic coherence. According to Tocqueville, the United States never was and
never would be an environment favorable to the cultivation of careful deliberation, theoretical
analysis, or precision in thought.^6 To put the point simply, Tocqueville’s description of American
education illustrates part of the reason why Socrates’manner of teaching was difficult to reproduce
on the American continent in its classical form. For it to become popular, it would have to adapt to
the larger patterns and peculiarities of American culture. The American mind has always had a
complicated and strained relationship with Socratic approaches to knowledge and teaching. This
point is worth bearing in mind as we turn to the early national period, and to the influential analysis
of Franklin.
Franklin’s Socratism
Two guides were especially important in shaping how Americans came to think of the classics and
the usefulness of Socratic education: Franklin and Jefferson. Turning to these thinkers now will
allow us to examine the transformation of the Socratic method on a more concrete level. Both
Franklin and Jefferson agreed that the Socratic method needed to be modernized. But they diverged
on what this meant. Franklin’s contention was that Socrates’method was insufficiently social. For
Jefferson, Socrates was insufficiently democratic.
72 Andrew Bibby