What if Socrates taught high school?

A thought experiment and a dilemma.

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Here’s a thought experiment.

Let’s say we reincarnated (or cloned) Socrates and brought him in to teach at an American high school.

Socrates shows up to class, sipping coffee. He doesn’t know how to use the copy machine or the powerpoint, so he just strikes up a conversation with his students. He learns about their 21st century world. He asks them questions to help them think more critically about their surroundings. He provokes insights, new ways of approaching modern issues. Students leave class each day inspired, curious, and excited for the next day’s conversation.

Let’s say an administrator shows up one day to evaluate Mr. Socrates.

How would he be scored?

Inefficient use of instructional minutes. Classroom procedures need more structure. Objective not clearly stated or understood by students. Assessment methods are entirely absent.

After a year or two, drilled by technical professional development, Socrates finally learns how to teach effectively. He spends his summers writing out curriculum maps for the year, with specific learning objectives for each day. During the year he’s up late every night planning out his lessons, minute by minute. He stays home Saturdays to grade his students’ writing assignments with a rubric. He learns how to enter grades in the online grade book.

His evaluations have been stellar, but Socrates is burnt out. He is always daydreaming about freeing himself from the grind of teaching.

Eventually he says, welp, I love education and stuff, but there’s really more to life than this. I’ve had enough.

His principal understands. Everyone is proud of his commitment to trying out the profession. He really did improve. Don’t worry, he will get a good reference when he applies for his next job.

Not everyone is cut out for the teaching life.

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I wrote this thought experiment six years ago on my old blog. 

I was reminded of it, and felt inspired to republish it here, because I’ve been reading a short book on Socrates by historian Paul Johnson. 

Johnson writes the following about Socrates’ method of conversational teaching: 

What is particularly liberating about Socrates and is just as relevant today as in the fifth century B.C., is his hostility not just to the “right answer” as to the very idea of there being a right answer. He would have been particularly opposed to the modern system, used in every kind of bureaucratic form-filling and increasingly in examination papers at all levels of the education system, of asking people not to give their answers to a question, but to examine various answers and pick the right one. This denial of independent thought by individuals was exactly the kind of mentality he spent his life in resisting.

This is the dilemma of our education system. 

We want the system to be standardized, but the system relies on individual teachers who bring along their own styles, abilities, and interests. The more we try to structure it as a “plug and play” for any person who decides to sign up and teach that year, the more we create a stifling environment which frustrates the creative types who might have the ability to bring a subject alive for students.

The desire to standardize the system is understandable. We want every student to get a good education, and we don’t want to leave it to chance whether a student gets a super gifted teacher or not. 

Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, writes that when it comes to moving the needle on academic improvement, “curriculum reform is the one approach that hasn’t yet been tried to break out of an exhausting cycle of failures.”

His argument is that teachers basically have two jobs. One, the job of creating a curriculum that includes lesson plans and assessments. Two, the job of teaching the class and providing feedback in the form of corrections and grades. 

Pondiscio says most teachers are not very good at job one, which harms the effectiveness of job two. And even if a teacher is good at job one, it consumes time and energy that would be better spent focusing on job two

The solution, therefore, is that we should give teachers a fully formed curriculum ready to go. Plug and play. 

When I was a younger teacher, I would have pushed back on this idea because I wanted to have control over what I taught. 

Now that I’m a bit older, I welcome the idea … at least on paper.

When it comes to practice, I simply don’t trust that a pre-packaged curriculum would be designed well enough to actually work in a classroom of students.

When I say “work” I mean it in a subjective way. When I look at a lesson plan, I can imagine how it will probably go.

The designers of the curriculum would say of course it works, idiot, if you just implement it correctly. Your students are sure to appreciate this wonderfully researched curriculum we sold to your district administrators. 

I don’t know.

I agree with the assertion that if schools used a more structured curriculum across the board, it could lead to higher outcomes in terms of how we measure academic progress. I agree that a lot of teachers use random materials they find on the internet when they are too tired or busy to write good plans. It would be better for teachers to use a fully formed, rigorous curriculum rather than a haphazard, sloppy curriculum. 

But people aren’t robots, and I think we would be wise to take a step back and re-examine the nature of the educational outcomes we think are important. Maybe it’s possible to inject some liveliness into our schools without shortchanging the intellectual rigor.

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