By Jill Szoo Wilson
Socrates left a legacy without pages or diagrams. No book, no formal lectures, no chalkboard sketches survive him. What endures is the way he lived with others: asking questions, listening intently, and then pressing further. His gift is a method of dialogue that unsettles, clarifies, and invites. To teach in the Socratic tradition is to resist performance and cultivate a climate where inquiry carries more authority than certainty.
That tradition speaks as directly to the classroom as it does to a fractured culture. In both settings, the Socratic method interrupts the rush to easy answers. It honors the long pause. It elevates the well-placed question above the polished explanation. What begins as a teaching practice matures into a posture for living, one that dignifies thought and relationship by daring to stay with questions.
The Marketplace Origins: Asking Instead of Telling
Athens in Socrates’ lifetime was a city at once confident and restless. Fresh from its victories over Persia, it stood as the cultural beacon of Greece. Marble temples gleamed on the Acropolis, dramatists filled the theatres with tragedies and comedies, and statesmen praised the promise of democracy. Yet beneath this brilliance ran deep fissures—political rivalries, the scars of war, and a constant struggle over who truly held power.
The agora, Athens’ central marketplace, embodied this tension. It was a place of commerce and spectacle: stalls piled with figs and olives, artisans hammering bronze, and heralds shouting the news of decrees and battles. Philosophers debated beside fishmongers; politicians addressed citizens over the clamor of bargaining; incense smoke mingled with the smell of fresh bread and animals waiting for sacrifice. It was here, amid noise and distraction, that Socrates carved out his peculiar space.
He would stop citizens in their errands and ask them to define justice, courage, or piety, slowly unraveling their answers until their certainties frayed. In Euthyphro, he presses a man outside the courthouse to explain piety, only to show that each attempt contradicts the last. In Laches, he asks two generals to define courage, and their confident replies dissolve into confusion. In the opening of Republic, he challenges Cephalus and Polemarchus on the meaning of justice, demonstrating how easily their definitions falter under questioning. What seemed like simple conversation became a mirror, exposing how fragile even the most assured convictions were. Plato’s dialogues preserve these encounters not as tidy resolutions but as open-ended confrontations with truth.
What set Socrates apart was not the possession of wisdom but the way he pursued it. He treated each encounter as a mutual investigation, overturning the idea that knowledge could be handed down like a finished object. Truth, for him, was something coaxed into view through dialogue, through the disciplined art of asking.
Socrates’ conversations in the marketplace did more than unsettle individuals; they modeled a form of learning that has echoed across centuries. What began among merchants and magistrates in Athens set the pattern for dialogue wherever teaching takes place. The classroom, no less than the agora, can become a site where questions break open assumptions and where truth takes shape in conversation.
The Classroom as Dialogue
In a modern classroom, the Socratic method unfolds in deceptively simple ways. A student offers an answer. Rather than affirm or correct, the teacher presses: Why? What evidence supports that? Could it be otherwise? The questions circle, sometimes frustratingly, until the student is forced to examine not only the conclusion but the reasoning beneath it.
Educational research helps explain why this works. In a classic study published in Cognitive Science, Michelene Chi and her colleagues found that students who were prompted to generate their own explanations remembered concepts more deeply and transferred their knowledge more effectively than those who were simply told the answer (Chi, de Leeuw, Chiu, & LaVancher, 1994). The act of reasoning aloud forces the mind to weave fragments of knowledge into coherence. In other words, the question matters more than the answer.
The Socratic method also relies on what psychologists call productive struggle. Manu Kapur, writing in Cognition and Instruction in 2008, demonstrated that students who wrestled with challenging problems, even to the point of initial failure, ultimately achieved more robust learning than those given immediate instruction. The discomfort of not knowing is not a flaw in the process. It is the process. A teacher’s role is not to step in too quickly, but to sustain that tension just long enough for students to find their own foothold.
Silence, too, is part of the method. Mary Budd Rowe’s pioneering research on “wait time” in the 1970s revealed that when teachers extended their pause after asking a question from one second to three or more, students’ answers became longer, more thoughtful, and more complex. What can feel like an empty pause to the teacher becomes essential space for the student, a place where thought can ripen. The Socratic method depends on this kind of patience.
This approach does not abandon structure. It requires precision. The teacher must listen closely, know when to push further, and know when to let silence do the work. In this sense, Socratic teaching is less about performance and more about orchestration. It is the art of drawing forth what already exists in the room.
One can think of it as choreography. Students move between certainty and doubt, between answer and reconsideration. The teacher’s role is not to correct their steps but to keep them dancing.
Everyday Questions: Beyond the Classroom
The Socratic method is not confined to philosophy seminars or literature courses. Its spirit belongs equally to the conversations of daily life. In relationships, questions can transform conflict into dialogue. A child says to a parent, “You never listen to me.” The reflexive answer is defensive. The Socratic one is curious: What do you mean when you say I don’t listen? Can you give me an example?
This instinct to probe rather than defend rests on something deeper than style; it rests on the nature of curiosity itself. Psychologists remind us that curiosity is more than idle wondering. George Loewenstein, in a landmark 1994 article in Psychological Bulletin, described curiosity as an “information gap,” the restless tension that arises when we sense something missing in our understanding. More recent work in Frontiers in Psychology shows that when students encounter uncertainty, curiosity becomes the force that drives them to explore and make new connections (Vogl, Pekrun, Murayama, and Loderer, 2020).
In friendships, in workplaces, even in disagreements over politics or faith, asking rather than asserting changes the emotional temperature. A statement closes the door. A question cracks it open. Curiosity reveals something essential about imagination: how a person envisions not only what is, but what could be; the possibilities they long to explore, the connections they hope to forge with themselves, with others, and with the world.
Neuroscience reinforces this. Celeste Kidd and Benjamin Hayden, writing in Neuron in 2015, define curiosity as “the motivation to seek information for its own sake.” In a related study, Matthias Gruber and colleagues demonstrated that curiosity activates the brain’s reward circuits and strengthens memory formation (Neuron, 2014). A good question, then, does more than elicit an answer. It calls imagination into play, deepens memory, and builds connection.
This does not mean questions are neutral. They can unsettle. They can demand honesty. Yet precisely because they do not declare, they invite the other person into the act of discovery. Socratic questioning is not about winning an argument. It is about honoring another’s mind enough to linger with them in uncertainty and to treat their imagination and hopes as worthy of exploration.
The Risks of Unsettling: A Real Life Example
To live by questions is to embrace vulnerability. Students often resist when pressed beyond their first answers. They want the comfort of being told they are correct. Adults, too, may bristle when asked to explain themselves. The Socratic method exposes the fragility of our assumptions, and this exposure can feel threatening.
On the first day of one of my Theatre classes this semester, I asked my students, “What is art?” I called on each of them to give me a definition and wrote down the key words from their responses: skill, technique, motivation to create, free speech, passion, purpose, beauty, subjectivity, therapy, communication, no rules, and evolving.
We then took each word and examined it together. “Beauty,” I asked, “is beauty art? Is art beauty?” One student pushed back: “Well, art can be beautiful, but it can also be scary. Or ugly. Or even neutral, depending on who’s looking at it. So, no. Beauty is not art.” I pressed further: “Can we agree that beauty is a descriptor of some art? Maybe we could even say all beauty points to an artist?” Another student jumped in: “Not really. A tree is beautiful. Clouds are beautiful. They appear from natural processes. So they aren’t art.” I redirected, “Can we agree that beauty is a function of art?” And on the conversation went until the students decided to cross beauty off the list.
One by one, we worked through each of the words on the list in the same way, weighing assumptions, testing counterexamples, and listening carefully to each other’s reasoning. By the end, the only words left on the board were creation, purpose, and expression. Together, we concluded that art is “creative expression on purpose.” The definition wasn’t handed down. It was discovered.
Moments like these illustrate both the risk and the reward of the Socratic method. Students feel unsettled at first, stripped of the security of a quick, “right” answer. However, the unease compels them to move past preconceived notions and into genuine thought. Jack Mezirow, in his work on transformative learning, called these moments “disorienting dilemmas,” disruptions that compel us to reconsider our frames of reference (Mezirow, 1991). Similarly, research on “desirable difficulties” in learning shows that challenges that slow down the process often produce stronger retention and deeper understanding (Bjork & Bjork, 2011).
Teachers who practice this method must learn patience. Silence stretches. Frustration mounts. The temptation to resolve the tension with a quick answer is strong. But to yield too soon is to miss the point. Socratic dialogue insists that truth is not a prize handed down but a path walked together.
These moments of questioning can be charged, uncomfortable, and revealing. They carry the risk of resistance, but they also create the conditions for genuine transformation. To teach Socratically is to accept that unease is not failure. It is the very ground where change takes root.
The Gift of Dialogue
The gift of the Socratic method lies in its redefinition of authority. The teacher’s power is not in providing answers but in dignifying students with the capacity to seek their own. To be asked a serious question is to be taken seriously. It signals that one’s perspective matters, that one’s reasoning deserves attention.
This gift matters far beyond the classroom. The United States is in a season of turmoil. Every time an angry word is shouted, a bullet flies through the air, or a cultural symbol is weaponized, dialogue fractures into generalizations, name-calling, and heels dug into the soil where the blood of ancestors who fought in the Civil War still lingers. When dialogue collapses, we don’t only lose civility. We lose the possibility of understanding.
One afternoon, I set aside my lecture notes and simply asked my class, “How are you all? If there was one thing you would want my generation to understand about your generation, what would it be?” The room quieted. Students looked at each other, then at me, and began to speak. Their answers were not rehearsed. They spilled out of anxiety, depression, numbness, confusion, and a sense of chaos. And yet, as they named these things, the fire burning in the world outside our classroom seemed to recede. No one was trading positions or slogans. We were speaking above them. Each person had the opportunity to share complex thoughts, emotions, and ideas, while others listened.
All I did was ask a question and then pay attention.
Conclusion: Living With Questions
The Socratic method is more than a teaching strategy. It is a way of being present to the world with curiosity. It slows the rush toward certainty and leaves room for ambiguity while honoring the dignity of another person’s thought.
To live by questions is not easy. It asks for patience, humility, and a willingness to stay with silence. Yet in that space, understanding becomes possible. Dialogue deepens. Connections form. Perhaps this is why the method endures. Not because it guarantees answers, but because it keeps us searching, together.
Necessary Whispers 