Who knew such teachers still existed?

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they’re preparing the hemlock as we speak

An unidentified teacher gives a master class in critical thinking.

The Encyclopedia Britannica offers a pretty good description of the Socratic method of teaching, which I reprint below. I was fortunate enough in my education to have two different professors who employed the method perfectly: my crim law professor, Loftus Becker, and, two years before that, Dr. John Silber, in a seminar on Plato conducted, appropriately enough, one summer in Athens. I doubt many students today could be so lucky.

“Socratic method” has now come into general usage as a name for any educational strategy that involves cross-examination of students by their teacher. However, the method used by Socrates in the conversations re-created by Plato follows a more specific pattern: Socrates describes himself not as a teacher but as an ignorant inquirer, and the series of questions he asks are designed to show that the principal question he raises (for example, “What is piety?”) is one to which his interlocutor has no adequate answer. Typically, the interlocutor is led, by a series of supplementary questions, to see that he must withdraw the answer he at first gave to Socrates’ principal question, because that answer falls afoul of the other answers he has given. The method employed by Socrates, in other words, is a strategy for showing that the interlocutor’s several answers do not fit together as a group, thus revealing to the interlocutor his own poor grasp of the concepts under discussion. (Euthyphro, for example, in the dialogue named after him, having been asked what piety is, replies that it is whatever is “dear to the gods.” Socrates continues to probe, and the ensuing give-and-take can be summarized as follows: Socrates: Are piety and impiety opposites? Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates: Are the gods in disagreement with each other about what is good, what is just, and so on? Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates: So the very same actions are loved by some gods and hated by others? Euthyphro: Yes. Socrates: So those same actions are both pious and impious? Euthyphro: Yes.) The interlocutor, having been refuted by means of premises he himself has agreed to, is free to propose a new answer to Socrates’ principal question; or another conversational partner, who has been listening to the preceding dialogue, is allowed to take his place. But although the new answers proposed to Socrates’ principal question avoid the errors revealed in the preceding cross-examination, fresh difficulties are uncovered, and in the end the “ignorance” of Socrates is revealed as a kind of wisdom, whereas the interlocutors are implicitly criticized for failing to recognize their ignorance.