Socrates Underground
We can start by noting that the rediscovery of Plato and Socrates are separate historical problems.
Whereas one could trace the rediscovery of Plato to the renewal of interest in the scholarship of
ancient Greece in the works of Alfarabi and other eighth- and ninth-century Arabic scholars, the
rediscovery of the Socratic method does not appear to follow the same timeline, at least not in any
obvious way. In fact, the renewed interest in Socrates as a teacher lags–by hundreds of years–
behind the renewed interest in Socrates’ideas.
The first evidence of a reawakening of the Socratic method does not appear until the sixteenth
century. Interest in Socratic teaching methods appears to coincide with interest in the study of
maieuticsduring this century.Maeutica, generally, can be defined as a pedagogical technique in
which the teacher proceeds primarily with questions, in lieu of a lecture or arguments. The goal of
maeiuticsis to lead the student either to discover the answer for themselves or, to lead the student to
a more profound sense or awareness of the limits of knowledge. Examples include several pub-
lished works on Socratic-inspired“dialectical methods”in the works of the French scholar Pierre de
la Ramee (1543–1555); and in the writings of the German humanist Johannes Sturm (1507–1589).
The first sustained discussion of a“Socratic teaching”does not appear, at least in written form,
until the early eighteenth century.^1 The wordelenchusappears in English texts in 1748. The term
“Socratic method”does not appear to have been used commonly until much later still, when it was
popularized in educational settings at the turn of the twentieth century. Even then, the phrase
“Socratic method”does not appear to be used nearly as frequently as the more technical term
elenchus, the preferential phrase of classicists and historians.
The earliest written reflections on the Socratic approach for modern republics are positive and
complimentary. One particularly positive review appears in the works of the Scottish scholar, David
Fordyce, who asserted that the“SocraticDoctrine :::sets [the mental] Faculty a working, and
supplies it with materials to fashion.”^2 English writer Isaac Watts makes similar arguments: the
Socratic method provides an effective alternative to rote learning. It is, in Watts’words, a“more
pleasant, and a more sprightly way of instruction.”It was“more fit to excite the attention and
sharpen the penetration of the learner”than traditional methods, including“silent attention to the
lecturer.”^3 Watts’book on education was printed in Boston in 1754. It was the first print reference
focused on Socrates as teacher in the American colonies.
Not all commentaries on the Socratic method were positive. Fordyce, who described Socrates as
a“quickener of wit,”followed this positive comment with an observation that illustrates the
problem Socrates gave later thinkers–including Franklin and Jefferson–pause. As Fordyce noted,
the method was not entirely open-ended or content-neutral. It had the tendency, as Fordyce
observed, to“free the mind”from“Dependence on Authority.”Fordyce was only repeating what
had already been well established by critics of Socrates in Europe; namely, that Socrates and Plato’s
teaching methods were“Enemies to dogmatizing, and rather doubting and denying than asserting
anything.”^4
Jack Schneider has provided a detailed account of the ways in which the Socratic method was
further altered, processed, and filtered in the United States. The emergence of public schooling in
the 1830s increased pressure on paid teachers to keep their students’attention, including a few
misguided attempts to combine“catechizing with Socratizing.”The opening of private and reli-
gious schools to a wider American public put more pressure on traditional“lecture and rote
memorization”teachers to diversify their approaches to education. After the Civil War, there was an
increased demand for professionalization, and as a result, a renewed effort by administrators and
educators in schools to employ the Socratic method as a“credentialing”tool (Socrates’teaching as
the“inheritance of antiquity”). Compulsory schooling laws in the nineteenth century motivated
teachers to find different ways to engage their students. New laws against corporal punishment
further limited the“teacher’s toolkit for controlling the classroom.”In the twentieth century, the
The Americanization of the Socratic Method 71