Socratic Education Methodology is an Anti-Tyranny Device

Jesus taught in a Socratic style — gently, by question and parable, guiding people into a different way of thinking and speaking. He was effective enough at this to come to the attention of the Roman state.

Here are just some of the ways which Jesus taught:

Neighbor / mercy

Parable: the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25–37) — asked after “Who is my neighbor?” so the question turns the lawyer’s categories inside out.

Lost and sought

Parables: Lost Sheep, Lost Coin, Prodigal Son (Luke 15) — each asks, without saying so, what kind of joy the group allows for the one who was gone.

Debt and judgment

Implied question after the unforgiving servant: how can you demand what you were freely spared? (Matthew 18:23–35)

Parable: Unforgiving Servant — forces the hearer to measure their own ledger.

Who do you say?

Not a parable, but pure Socratic move: public opinion first, then the hearer’s own answer.

Workers and fairness

Parable: Laborers in the Vineyard — exposes the hive’s sense of deserved rank.

Two sons / vineyard

Parable: Two Sons — which son did the father’s will? Agreeable speech vs. changed action.

Wedding / invitation

Parable: Great Banquet / Wedding Feast (Luke 14; Matthew 22) — who actually comes when called? Status and excuse become the answer.

Soil / hearing

Parable: Sower — hearing itself is sorted; the question is whether you have ears.

Speck and plank

Short image, same method: the group’s moral gaze turned back on the gazer.

Frightening enough to the Roman state to drive them to brand him as a criminal. Forever elevating Jesus, and the lessons he taught, into an institutionalized religion. A religion which gradually, over time, was transformed into more of a state sponsored institution.

Today religions serve as an important part of the identity of great geopolitical powers. Most neighborhoods and cities have more churches than they do political and government offices. And many more educational and medical institutions.

Governments may be centralized in a capital, but that power is decentralized peripherally, flowing in both directions to and from the local nongovernmental institutions. Although the geopolitical dynamics in the capital city often predominates across a nation, the local institutions are vastly more important in determining a population’s thinking.

It is in the churches and medical & educational institutions where acceptable and agreeable thinking is determined. Thinking which is determined by the group, to be profitable and acceptable to the group.

Human history offers us a one stop shop to explore how and why this is true. Demonstrating that human individuals prefer to adjust their way of thinking to please the group, rather than risking disapproval.

While instances of thinking differently often lead to the positive breakthroughs for civilization as a whole, it is only after years of being thoroughly analyzed and evaluated for potential consequences to the group that one might be successfully adapted.

From this perspective we might conclude that humanity as a whole more resembles a hive mind, prioritizing benefits to the group over the benefits to the individual. This is not a particularly pleasant concept, but it does closely align with civilizational history.

Let’s examine this more thoroughly.

Power Players: Church, State, Education, Medicine

Humans in power, secure in professions and positions of power, make it their mission to certify truth. Enormous energy is devoted to building vast libraries of knowledge and information, peer reviewed bastions of truth. These intellectual structures are backed up by vastly wealthy and powerful systems of information handlers. With these systems in place a new idea must fight incredibly hard to be heard, let alone accepted.

Here we can visualize a vast psychosocial net in place to attempt to insure a method of thinking, of communication and education, which seems most favorable to the group. Is it some evil plan by cruel and unusual psychopaths to attempt to dominate and control?

Hardly. Although generations of writers and philosophers have tried to convince us of this.

Because if it is a few evil bankers or politicians, then hope exists to overcome this apparent hive mind thinking, by removing a few bad apples which spoil the barrel. The situation is far more complicated and dangerous than a few so called bad apples.

If humanity appears to prefer it this way, then this offers little to no chance to remedy the problem through politics. The founders of the American system believed this was the case. Due to their belief in a hive mind they distrusted pure democracy and preferred Republicanism.

The structure and function of the system they designed was intended to overcome the problem of the hive mind, which it did for a short while. Inevitably defeated by an overwhelming majority which preferred to be governed by those they perceived would control the population and keep the group safe.

As Bob Dylan describes it, this “hive mind” might become “enforced insanity”:

A hive mind is an incredibly powerful biological entity, one in which the members of the hive will defend the hive by sacrificing their own individual rights, well-being and lives.

How A Prussian-Style Education System Entered the USA:

The Missing Linguistic Bridge: Victor Cousin’s 1831 Mission and 1832 Report

Before American reformers like Horace Mann traveled to Europe, it was French philosopher and future education minister Victor Cousin who systematically documented the Prussian machine. Commissioned by the French government in 1831 to investigate German educational institutions, Cousin produced his landmark Rapport sur l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays de l’Allemagne, et particulièrement en Prusse, first published in 1832.

When translated into English by Sarah Austin in 1834, Cousin’s meticulous blueprint became available to English-speaking reformers. A New York edition followed in 1835, and an Albany digest appeared in 1836. It acted as an influential resource in the American common-school revival, offering reformers a concrete model of public oversight, teacher preparation and systematic educational administration. Its reception in Massachusetts helped bring Prussian arrangements into debates preceding the establishment of the state Board of Education.

Pre-Civil War America & Industrialized Education

Is it surprising this advice on education came from industrialized Europe before the Civil War?

The timing is entirely logical, as the transatlantic axis of the 1830s and 1840s was the precise window when both American industrialization and state-building were accelerating.

Before the Civil War, northern states were grappling with rapid urbanization, a massive influx of immigrant labor, and the transition from agrarian economies to factory-floor production. The Prussian model offered a highly structured, pre-tested solution to an urgent engineering problem: how to rapidly assimilate, standardize, and discipline a disparate populace into a predictable, compliant workforce.

By importing these centralized European methods before the fractured geopolitical landscape of the Civil War took hold, northern reformers successfully established the administrative architecture that would define post-war national education.

Socratic education threatens the entire system. Traditional education is designed to see that the individual must undergo a process of education which weeds out the dangerous thinkers, those who ask the wrong questions, from the approved ones. Socratic education reverse engineers this Prussian-derived system which prepares people to be agreeable, controllable workers.

This has created a very convoluted system of teaching, learning and thinking, which has most humans voicing a desire for freedom and autonomy while simultaneously demonstrating that they desire a geopolitical structure where powerful elites make the decisions and decide the thinking.

This offers us a great paradox, one which Thomas Pynchon distinguished as being forced to choose between Paranoia or Anti-Paranoia. Meaning that carrying this knowledge of hive mind thinking we must select one of two choices. (1) to be paranoid of what our fellow species will do (2) to take a position of anti-paranoia, believing that all will be well.

This corresponds to what other literati have shown: from Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”, to Bloom’s ineffectual attempts to think for himself.

And finally Thomas’s refusal to mourn for the death of a child - selecting as a free thinking individual to choose anti-paranoia.

Jesus selected for maybe the ultimate anti-paranoia thinking, and Dante and Socrates, as well.

We must ask the question here: Why does humanity frequently celebrate the work of creative thinkers who represent thinking completely and diametrically opposed to their own style of thinking?

Notes

Questions and parables. Luke 10:25–37; Matthew 18:12–14 and Luke 15; Matthew 18:23–35; Matthew 16:13–15; Matthew 20:1–16; Matthew 21:28–32; Luke 14:15–24 and Matthew 22:1–14; Mark 4:1–20; Matthew 7:1–5. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/luke/10

Roman execution. Tacitus, Annals 15.44.3; Mark 15. https://dcc.dickinson.edu/tacitus-annals/15-44

Religion and imperial institutions. The Edict of Milan (313); Theodosian Code 16.1.2 (380). https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/edict-milan.asp and https://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/source/theodcodeXVI.asp

American observations of Prussian education. Karl-Ernst Jeismann, “American Observations Concerning the Prussian Educational System in the Nineteenth Century,” in German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917, ed. Henry Geitz, Jürgen Heideking and Jürgen Herbst (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21–42.

Horace Mann. Seventh Annual Report of the Board of Education; Together with the Seventh Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1844).

Victor Cousin. Report on the State of Public Instruction in Prussia, Addressed to the Count de Montalivet, Peer of France, Minister of Public Instruction and Ecclesiastical Affairs, trans. Sarah Austin (London: Effingham Wilson, 1834). Compulsory attendance (Title IV of the 1819 draft law), 25–30; the two degrees of primary instruction, 4–7; teacher seminaries, 60–64. https://archive.org/details/reportonstatepu00austgoog

Cousin in America. American editions: New York, 1835; Albany digest, 1836. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/102697337 and https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100139407

Prussian elementary schools. Gregory P. Wegner, “Prussian Volksschulen through American Eyes: Two Perspectives on Curriculum and Teaching from the 1890s,” in German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 59–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139052481.005

German learned professions. Charles E. McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalization: Modern Learned Professions and Their Organizations from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Hitler Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).