I would like to offer an explanation of the widely prevalent misunderstanding of what a good Socratic seminar should be. More than an explanation of that misunderstanding, it points to the reason why many teachers will recoil from the correct understanding that I am here offering, to replace the misunderstanding that now prevails.

The reason that many teachers will resist or even resent being told that in conducting seminars as Socratic moderators of them they should regard themselves as superior to their students (as they do regard themselves as superior when they are engaged in didactic teaching) lies in a malaise that pervades the whole academic world.

In our schools and colleges, both students and teachers suppose that, outside the sphere of mathematics, the exact sciences, history and even sometimes social studies, there are no right and wrong answers to questions, no true and false propositions, no adequate and inadequate arguments or explanations.

That being the case, how dare teachers correct students in seminars when the questions raised are not about matters of fact or answerable in terms of well-established knowledge in a given field of subject matter? And if they dared to do so, wouldn't they be faced by students who challenged their right to do so?

The cultural or intellectual malaise of which I speak can be described as phony tolerance. It denounces as dogmatic and authoritarian anyone who regards one person's opinion as better than another's. It translates everyone's right to hold whatever opinions can be espoused into an acquiescence in the view that all opinions are equally tenable, no one better, sounder, truer than another.

Freedom of thought and expression includes the freedom to be wrong as well as to be right; it does not abolish the distinction between right and wrong. It also involves the freedom to change your mind when contrary evidence advanced and reasons given should cause you to change your mind when you are wrong. Your right to hold whatever opinion you happen to espouse in no way guarantees that the opinion you happen to hold is right, nor does it mean that you should not yield to correction and not change your mind if it can be shown that you are wrong.

Teachers who, in conducting seminars, fail to correct students when they are wrong, because they misunderstand the meaning of freedom of thought and discussion, do not discharge their obligation as teachers. Students who resist being corrected or cry out that they are being intimidated by their teachers who correct them do not discharge their obligation as students. They lack the essential virtue of students -- docility, which is a mean between subservience and contentiousness. The use of the word "intimidation" indicates that both the teachers and the students misunderstand their relationship and their mutual obligation to one another.

I recommend to all who aspire to become truly Socratic or teacher moderators of seminars that they read the best statement ever made about freedom of thought and expression. It is to be found in the second chapter of J. S. Mill's great essay "On Liberty." I also recommend reading the chapters on truth in a book of mine, "Six Great Ideas", especially chapters 6-8.

This is the medicine that may help cure the malaise I have called phony twentieth-century tolerance. Without that cure being effected for students and teachers, there is little hope that they will ever enjoy the profit, and the pain as well as the pleasure, of good Socratic seminars.

Max:

I just wanted you to know that I count as probably the greatest benefit I get from receiving the Online journal is the opportunity to forward the message to my twelve year old with an invitation for her to ask questions. In this way you are helping me with my highest priority -- the one thing I must do very, very well -- the raising of my children.

I also forward some to a friend of mine who is having a little trouble raising his children to be intellectually curious and to be focused on laying the foundation for solid high-aiming lives. His children are older and I sometimes fear he did not start early enough.

Thanks for everything,

Fritzie Reisner

"DON'T CALL ME MISS STEIN"
by Mortimer Adler -- (Chicago, 1930s)

Bob and Maude Hutchins gave a dinner party for her during her visit . . . As we took our places at the table -- and certainly before we had been fortified by coffee and cognac -- Gertrude turned on Bob and said, "Where have you been, Hutchins, and what have you been doing?" A little weary at the end of the day, Bob was taken aback by the abruptness and forcefulness of the attack (the energy Gertrude exuded in a small room hit one like Niagara Falls). Bob replied, as briefly and effortlessly as possible, "Miss Stein, Mr. Adler and I have been teaching the great books." Gertrude pounced on him again and with even more vigor. "Don't call me Miss Stein," she said; "call me Gertrude Stein. What are the great books?" Bob tried to explain the basic educational idea in reading and discussing great books with college students, but he kept forgetting how she insisted upon being addressed, and so he was forever being interrupted by Gertrude's peremptory injunction "Don't call me Miss Stein; call me Gertrude Stein."

At one point I decided to come to Bob's rescue by going downstairs to my briefcase and getting out the list of the great books. I showed it to her. She scanned the list quickly and just as quickly asked, "Do you read these books in their original languages or in English translations?" Hutchins explained that our freshman [University of Chicago] students did not have competence in Greek and Latin or Italian and French, and were finding it difficult enough to read the books in English. This infuriated Miss Stein, I mean Gertrude Stein. She laid it down as an unchallengeable axiom that great literature was essentially untranslatable. Hutchins and I then tried to argue with her, pointing out that we were concerned mainly with the ideas that were to be found in the great books. She might be right, we admitted; fine writing suffers in translation, but ideas somehow transcend the particular language in which they are first expressed.

TRASHY AND VICIOUS
From The Springfield Republican *

The Concord public library committee deserve well of the public by their action in banishing Mark Twain's new book, "Huckleberry Finn", on the ground that it is trashy and vicious. It is time that this influential pseudonym should cease to carry into homes and libraries unworthy productions. Mr. Clemens is a genuine and powerful humorist, and with a bitter vein of satire on the weaknesses of humanity which is sometimes wholesome, sometimes only grotesque, but in certain of his works degenerates into a gross trifling with every fine feeling. The trouble with Mr. Clemens is that he has no reliable sense of propriety. His notorious speech at an Atlantic dinner, marshaling Longfellow and Emerson and Whittier in vulgar parodies in a Western miner's cabin, illustrated this, but not in much more relief than the "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" did, or than these Huckleberry Finn stories do. The advertising samples of this book, which have disfigured the Century magazine, are enough to tell any reader how offensive the whole thing must be. They are no better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population. Mr. Clemens has made them smarter, for he has an inexhaustible fund of "quips and cranks and wanton wiles," and his literary skill is, of course, superior, but their moral level is low, and their perusal cannot be anything less than harmful.

* The New York Times, March 19, 1885

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