In the Theaetetus, Socrates describes himself as a midwife of the mind:
The difference is that I attend men and not women, and that I watch over the labor of their souls, not of their bodies. Theaetetus 150b.
Socrates, however, declared himself “barren of wisdom” (150c). Yet he is one of the greatest teachers in history. How can this be? How can he assist in the birth of ideas he does not impart?
We consider this apparent contradiction in the context of my ongoing series on teaching. In the first article, Teaching Triangles, I introduced the diagram:
Learning involves more than getting to a correct answer. After all, one can guess, memorize, or cheat. Understanding takes the hard road, pausing and puzzling rather than rushing on to “get through the material.”
In the second article, The Master and the Magister, I observed that the mastery of a subject (be it Latin or calculus) does not alone make one a good teacher. One must understand one’s students, have a feel for their more limited perspective, and have a strong first-hand familiarity with what it is like to expand one’s intellectual horizon. To be a good teacher, one must be a lifelong learner.1
Our paradox with Socrates takes us back to the beginning. In our diagram this is reflected as L, the lower left corner. Our problem is this: what makes it possible to climb toward understanding? What is that without which the best that can be done is memorize or guess? And how can a teacher help turn the student toward the inconvenient high road, instead of shuffling along toward uninspired answers?
The Temptation of Easy Knowledge
The snake in Eden knew of our temptation to seek knowledge without labor. Knowledge is intrinsically good. The serpent’s particular cunning was that he offered knowledge that was simply there for the taking.
As Theophilus of Antioch put it:
The tree of knowledge itself was good, and its fruit was good. For it was not the tree, as some think, but the disobedience, which had death in it. For there was nothing else in the fruit than only knowledge; but knowledge is good when one uses it discreetly. But Adam, being yet an infant in age, was on this account as yet unable to receive knowledge worthily. For now, also, when a child is born it is not at once able to eat bread, but is nourished first with milk, and then, with the increment of years, it advances to solid food. Thus, too, would it have been with Adam; for not as one who grudged him, as some suppose, did God command him not to eat of knowledge. To Autolycus II.25
And how is knowledge to be received worthily? Howard Eves relates a famous anecdote in Mathematical Reminiscences in which Einstein was asked by a Mrs. Veblen to explain relativity at tea. Einstein, wisely, did not indulge her. Rather, he told a parable of trying to explain the white hue of milk to a blind friend. What Einstein was implicitly criticizing was the sin of pride. What is needed is humility, Socratic wisdom, an appreciation of the long road to learning deep truths.
The physicist Richard Feynman is famous for the “Feynman method”—not his invention, but a method popularized under his name. The Feynman method involves testing one’s own knowledge by writing an explanation to a child of 12. The method could be misunderstood to imply that anything worth knowing can be communicated to a child. What cannot be communicated to a child, or at least to the educated layman, is academic obfuscation.
Yet Feynman was under no illusions about whether a child would understand physics; the one whose knowledge is advanced by the method is the writer. He remarks in one of his lectures:
Because atomic behavior is so unlike ordinary experience, it is very difficult to get used to, and it appears peculiar and mysterious to everyone—both to the novice and to the experienced physicist. Even the experts do not understand it the way they would like to, and it is perfectly reasonable that they should not, because all of direct, human experience and of human intuition applies to large objects. We know how large objects will act, but things on a small scale just do not act that way. So we have to learn about them in a sort of abstract or imaginative fashion and not by connection with our direct experience. Feynman Lectures III.1-1
Socrates could go further; ordinary experience does not suffice for the genuine knowledge of anything, large or small. Feynman remarks in QED that “One had to lose one’s common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.” As Socrates showed by pestering his fellow Athenians, one’s common sense is inadequate to the genuine knowledge of anything at any level.
So the Book of Nature ought not to be received in an unworthy manner. But such sins of pride do not occur only in the sciences. After 10 or 20 years of marriage, might one suppose that one pretty well knows everything about one’s spouse? That an image-bearer of God is devoid of deep mystery? Or perhaps there is some mystery there, but it is of no particular interest? Do we find that humility, wonder, spontaneous questions, and love depend on and reinforce each other?
Whither Truth?
But our present concern is the education of children. What is the worthy manner in which knowledge might be received in the classroom? Socrates, we saw, is “barren of wisdom.” Perhaps the truth is to be found in textbooks. Is teaching a matter of just taking up and reading, of plucking the truths out of the text as one might pluck a fig from a tree?
Thomas Aquinas declares that, properly speaking, the truth exists only in the intellect:
sed terminus cognitionis, quod est verum, est in ipso intellectu. Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, co.
Truth, strictly speaking, is only in the mind. But just as we might call chopped spinach “healthy,” not because it itself is healthy but because it brings about health in us when eaten, so we might speak analogically of truth outside the mind. But just as life is no longer present in chopped vegetables, truth is not present in spoken or written words.
I do not want to give the impression that I am appealing to Thomas’ authority. Even more importantly, I do not want the claim about the locus of truth to seem abstruse, something which concerns only philosophers. Students often grasp the fact of the matter more easily than the expert: in themselves, diagrams on a board are mere chalk lines and curves; textbooks are bound, ink-dotted paper.
Good textbooks are wonderful instruments for producing understanding, but without a further active ingredient, they are paper and ink. What is that missing ingredient? It is wonder, curiosity, puzzlement; it is the universal human impulse to ask “why?”
Socrates’ genius as a teacher was in the questions he asked rather than the answers he provided, in the knack for puncturing pretense, instilling doubt where certainty had mindlessly taken hold, and recognizing that it is only through labor that the light dawns. It was in awakening, sustaining, and inflaming the curiosity we are born with so that it flourishes rather than sputters out. And it is in those lights, only pinpoints individually, that civilization can not only survive but flourish.
To be continued in Part 2 – the Necessity of Wonder
- Lifelong learning is not limited to academic pursuits.↩︎
All quotations of Plato are from Plato: Collected Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Hackett: 1997).
