In the current educational environment, it is unpopular to argue that a professor should ever make
a student feel shame. There is plenty of research demonstrating the deleterious effects of shame on
students.^42 Undoubtedly, shame can become pathological, and it is not the right strategy to employ
with all students, especially not Safe Spacers or those who are naturally shy. At the same time,
shame has a positive role in the development of a healthy psyche. Shamelessness leads to antisocial
tendencies, lack of respect for others, unrealistic self-appraisal, megalomania, and various types of
personality disorders. As Johnson writes,“it is probably impossible to eliminate shame from the
classroom. Nor would we wish to. Shame is an intrinsic part of effective socialization.”^43 The
effective use of shame in the classroom is something worthy of more scholarly attention, especially
in the age of right-wing Trolls.
Conclusion
Two general pieces of advice: first, be open with students about your Socratic approach at the start
of a course; second, be attentive to the various types of souls in your class, responding to each in
kind, and thereby establishing a classroom environment in which students can become open, or at
least not openly hostile, to Socratic teaching. On the one hand, the environment cannot become
hostile, where students exchange angry barbs with each other and with the professor; on the other,
the professor should not, out of fear or intellectual laziness, become obsequious, simply catering to
her students and avoiding controversial topics so as to be“popular”and curry favor. This is a
difficult balance to strike, and any educator who truly employs the Socratic method takes risks, both
philosophical and professional.
These are challenging times to be a Socratic professor, but Socratic pedagogy is needed as much
as ever. The goal is to recruit students into Socratic dialectics without alienating or unnecessarily
offending. There is no guarantee that any of the strategies suggested above will work; you could end
uprunningafoul of your students and institution, potentially facing (contradictory) chargesof being
an impractical Luddite, a bigoted conservative, or a left-wing propagandist. But for the Socratic
professor, there is no other choice than to continue trying to create the space in which the method
can be practiced. After all, the unexamined life is not worth living, and it is in the name of that life
that the Socratic professor must dive in and take risks.
Notes
1 For American statistics on the decline of humanities bachelors, see“Bachelor’s Degrees in the Human-
ities,”Humanities Indicators: A Project of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, May 2017, http://www.
humanitiesindicators.org/content/indicatordoc.aspx?i=34. Accessed June 28, 2017. For Canadian stat-
istics, see“The Future of Liberal Arts: Report,”Universities Canada, 2016, https://www.univcan.ca/
the-future-of-the-liberal-arts-report. Accessed July 31, 2017.
2 Martha Nussbaum,Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities(Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 2010); Fareed Zakaria,In Defense of a Liberal Education(New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,
2015). For Canadian perspectives, see David Livingstone, ed.,Liberal Education, Civic Education, and
the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2015).
3 See Sokolon’s“Poetic Questions in the Socratic Method”in this volume.
4 This is discussed at greater length in chapters by Jansche, LeMoine, and Sokolon in this volume.
5 Sherry Turkle,Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age(New York: Penguin Books,
2015), 213–17.
6 Michael Grace-Martin and Geri Gay,“Web Browsing, Mobile Computing, and Academic Performance,”
Educational Technology and Society4/3 (2001): 95–107; Carrie B. Fried,“In-Class Laptop Use and its
Effects on Student Learning,”Computers and Education, 50/3 (2008): 906–14; James M. Kraushaar and
David C. Novak,“Examining the Affects of Student Multitasking With Laptops During the Lecture,”
Journal of Information Systems Education21/2 (2010): 241–51.148 Paul Corey