Socratic Top 10 List

Give me Socrates any day.  Especially when it comes to school in the traditional sense.

As an 18 year old -- terribly naive and unfamiliar with what it took to engage a conversation beyond one or two superficial comments -- I ended up in a freshman seminar with a wild ex-Dept. Chair named James West at Trinity College in Hartford, CT.  The focus?  Communism and Facism in literature.  Not what I wanted (the Vietnam War was my top choice, I recall), but it was a life changer for me.  No, not because I was a fan of either totalitarian system, but because this frighteningly intellectual professor had a way of enacting a Socractic dead-grip on each of us in the class until one by one we began to truly analyze each text before us. 

I still recall almost every discussion we had and its been over 15 years, while 90% of the rest of my college courses I can barely recall other than a few random facts.  And I can say that what he did intutively and intentionally, asking each student to be prepared to speak for 90 minutes on a text each time they walked into a class (without apologizing to them) and rigorously using Socratic questioning tactics to challenge their arguments, stayed with me each day I taught for many years ahead.

All of this came back to mind recently in a blog post where Bill Belew recently offered up a quick reflection upon the "Top 10 Talking Schools" here in the US.  I'm thinking that a list like this -- far more than the many lists that pre-college students often memorize -- would serve a kid very well when it came to applying to schools.  Here's are the schools he lists from the Princeton Review list-happy folks:

10. Sweet Briar College - www.sbc.edu

9. Bard College www.bard.edu

8. College of the Atlantic - www.soa.edu

7. Reed College www.reed.edu

6. Hampshire College www.hampshire.edu

5. Bennington College www.bennington.edu

4. Simon's Rock College of Bard - www.simons-rock.edu

3. Wesleyan College www.wesleyan.edu

2. Sarah Lawrence College www.sarahlawrence.edu

1. Eugene Lang College - The New School for Liberal Arts www.lang.edu

Comments

[John Powers]

"Making meaning" is one of those expressions that tends to rile those outside the classroom. The Socratic method is very good, but as you suggest intimidating at times. Figuring out just what's important isn't an easy task for a thinker of any age.

So this http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/berkman_podcasting_and_news_me.html
isn't right on topic, but to the more basic subject of making meaning. Mark Frydenberg was teaching an Into to Tech course and for extra credit had students create podcasts about one of the topics in the class.

"He found that his students would listen to a podcast of the course for 6-10 minutes. (The course podcasts were an hour and 15 minutes.) So, he asked them to make podcasts of that length about the course topics."

The post documents how students learned so much and gained much from the exercise. I was struck by how making 6-10 minute podcasts the students had to digest the information. Not exactly the Socratic Method, but something similar at play.