Two Socratic educators discuss Socratic dialogues with children: Alana on survivalism

Hey Francisco, how are you doing?

Hi Michael, I'm good, how are you?

I'm well. So I just kind of introduce you in the audience. So Francisco and I worked at Academy of Thought and Industry last year, and among other things, we would go out and discuss Socratic seminars after each class. And sort of debrief after the experience, because we're both passionate and fascinated by this. So we thought we'd talk about Ethan and Alana videos. Do you want to add anything to that, Francisco? Tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, sure. I think share a lot of the philosophic background that Michael has. We went to the same school for undergraduate, uh, for our undergraduate degree and practiced Socratic seminars. And just right away I realized the power that this type of pedagogy has in all kinds of things— in developmental abstract thought, in personal growth, in emotional growth, emotional intelligence growth. And it just became to me a big question why it's not used everywhere. And I became very surprised that it's actually used very rarely, but when it's used, it's used so effectively. And this is, I think it's what made our connect, our first connection together and why we have been having many fruitful conversations.

Well, thank you. Of course, it's wonderful to have somebody who gets it. And over time, we'll have a chance to unpack a lot of those wonderful claims you made as we look at different, uh, Alana and Ethan videos. Today, Ethan was not available, just Alana. And it was also a little bit unusual because today it was less intellectual. And I don't know why, I was just, uh, she'd mentioned, um, that, you know, her family is having construction done on the house. And so I just thought I'm curious to know what she understands about building things. And so it kind of went from there. So before I unpack my perspective on Alana's video today, what's your take? Did it seem Socratic, not Socratic? If Socratic, in what ways? How does it fit within your understanding of what we're doing Socratically?

I agree with you that it differed from many of the other videos that you've done with Alana. In that there wasn't really a showcase of any analysis, any deep analysis. There was some— when she engaged in hypothetical, she had to think logically and stuff like that about the materials of building the house, for instance. But it wasn't what we've become— what I've become used to as an audience member of these videos, where she can jump from particulars to abstract thought very quickly, very well. But I think there was a lot of things accomplished. It also shows the scope of these types of conversations that are not necessarily abstract thinking but are also very useful.

Yeah, and just one of my goals is to— more than anything, you know, I want people to feel comfortable having a range of conversations, including intellectual conversations. And yeah, part of the intellectual is concrete to abstract. Part of it is applying to life. Part of it is I want to understand how they understand the world, and I want them to understand how they want to understand the world. And so, um, you know, I thought in some ways applying knowledge is a, um, you know, is another way to demonstrate understanding. Of course, I had no idea what she might or might not understand of the world. But I thought it would be fun to kind of check in and see, you know, how she actually understands the world, you know, and just kind of back up a little bit. I find that a lot of what school means to people is school means that they so-called learn a lesson from a teacher, but they don't really understand what's going on. Whereas for me, the, at bottom, the kind of Socratic impulse is I want to understand everything. I want to, I want to understand, you know, first and foremost intellectual content, but you know, I also want to understand how things work and they should be related. If I understand, you know, how an internal combustion engine works, I may not be able to actually fix one, but at least I should understand how it works. And so would you— do you kind of see a similar continuity between the abstract and intellectual and the applied?

Yes, definitely. And I wonder if you could say more about something you just mentioned of, I get the sense watching these videos that, wow, both of these people, different, obviously different ages, different experience, different expertise, different roles in the conversation, but both of them left having learned something or being genuinely curious about what they were discussing. Can you talk about the importance of doing that as a person engaging in conversation with a child?

You mean leaving with a child curious, being curious?

That being curious yourself and wanting to understand things, most importantly understand the student instead of, you know, the traditional model would be, oh, I want to get fact ABC into the student and have them repeat it. But a different model, the one I observe you doing, is no, I want as interlocutor to understand what's happening, to understand the person I'm talking to.

No, that's, that's, thank you. That's very well stated. So that's exactly right. And actually, I think sometimes for me, what's confusing is the whole process has become so simple and natural because for me, I want to understand what you, Francisco, are thinking. I want to understand what Ethan's thinking. I want to understand what Alana's thinking and how they think it. And so, you know, and if I read Kant, I want to understand what, what's Kant thinking. So for me, um, yeah, and I want to understand how the internal combustion engine works. For me, this kind of desire to understand the world, um, is so much ground zero that once one gets this, then asking questions, um, becomes very easy and natural. Um, so would you say that you're at a similar place where because you want to understand the world, asking questions has become easy and natural?

Yeah, I think so. I think that the moment, especially, uh, As an educator, the moment I realized that part of the goal is— it's going to sound funny, but to serve myself, right? It's the understanding that we're going to share. It's not the understanding that is going to get imparted from one person to another. The moment I realized that, that every moment of conversation is a moment of learning for both or for all parties, was, I think, the moment my practice changed a little. And what I noticed very much observing your classes.

And actually, this is an interesting difference in our kind of history with this. I would say for me, you know, I had a high school teacher who began leading classes Socratically, and I loved it. The way I described it is going from, you know, like a black and white world to a world in color. And so it's like Why would I ever listen to a lecture again? And so basically from that point on, I have had almost no patience. And for me, everything's— almost everything has been Socratic, whereas you actually had some experience trying to be a traditional teacher.

So you—

it sounds like you have more of a conversion from traditional teacher to Socratic. Is that accurate? And if so, you want to say a little bit about why it was a conversion process for you?

Sure, that is accurate. I think the main catalyst or the main force towards Socratic was just a deep intuition, a deep dissatisfaction of the way I was being taught and the way I saw other people engaging in education. I knew something was wrong, but I did not know what was wrong. So I think for the first, I would say, couple of years, of trying to teach myself, I just basically went through a list that I compiled as I researched of different ways you can go about having an education. And Socratic Conversations was in my radar, but it was at the bottom of the list. I said, it's so simple that maybe, I mean, what's the catch? You know, there's so many methods with all these rules and all these ways to do things that I now realize that are just repackaging of the traditional model. But the moment you say— the moment you, you say, I'm gonna genuinely just try to engage with someone, try to understand them, and then by doing so maybe understand a little more about the world around me and about myself, that, that was a big click. Okay, that what was wrong, that what That was what I was missing and that's what I'm going to try to do.

What's interesting about this for me is there are some, and maybe even many, conventional teachers who when they see what I'm doing Socratically, some of them feel as if it's not being responsible as an educator. Some people think that, you know, insofar as the standard model is I have content and I'm supposed to teach you and then I'm supposed to check for understanding, you know, there are all sorts of permutations on this. Insofar as I am, yeah, just curious and asking, they think he's not teaching. And some teachers are okay with a little bit of this and it can be a tool within the repertoire as long as we get to A, B, C, you know, this is what it is. But for me, that whole piece of it, which most people regard as teaching, is almost, you know, it's like a vestigial limb. It's not that I never ever use it, but It's a tiny part of it, and part of what I hope to demonstrate with the Ethan and Alana videos is when one works with a child like this over time, I predict that both Ethan and Alana will be able to understand conventional academic material like that. You know, they're— because they're in the habit of understanding things and habit of thinking through things and habit of reasoning things, when Alana gets to, you know, force equals mass times acceleration in middle school, even if she's never heard that formulation, she'll get it and she'll understand it way more deeply than will kids who have been taught stuff every year. And then, you know, it's not necessarily A or B, but, um, you know, I, I suspect kind of you share this, that once both as an educator and as a learner, once one develops this habit, the, the actual, as it were, learning. So I feel like I'm struggling with language, but you know, the actual conventional piece is relatively trivial.

Yeah, I completely agree. And I think it is especially valuable, the fact that you've done this with Alana now for, I take it, a couple years, right? The first video was when she was 4 years old and now she's 7.

So yeah, she's 7, she turns 8 in August.

Yeah, yeah. And, and it's valuable because it's quite clear the way she has become a more sophisticated thinker, a more self-aware person, a more— even a more empathetic— she, uh, a more empathetic person. I, I can see that she, uh, becomes increasingly more aware of you and your reactions as opposed to just answering questions and thinking of herself. And that makes me think about maybe one reason why people are reticent to leave traditional model is that though we can see the development in what you've done there, it's very hard to gauge performance metrics beforehand, right? It is hard to predict in what way Alana in this case is going to become a more sophisticated abstract thinker or more self-aware. I don't take it that you come with a conversation with that specific learning objective in hand, but that the development is is more organic and you don't know what's going to be developed in any one session. Is that—

does that sound right? Absolutely. That's absolutely correct. And again, that's exactly why after having done this for a lifetime in classrooms and in some ways having had spectacular success, but sometimes the tragedy for me is sometimes I have what I perceive as spectacular success and some people still don't get it. You know, I've seen classes and student development that are from my perspective, absolutely extraordinary. And some people think, well, they just talked. What do they do? They, you know, they didn't do anything. And so sometimes I've, you know, worked on SAT, a verbal growth as a metric. Sometimes I've had, you know, student writing before and after as a metric. I've looked at various metrics to kind of demonstrate the growth through this highly organic process. But with these longitudinal, right, Alana, it's going on 4 years now. You know, what will happen, will people say, oh, well, it worked for those kids. Over time, I want more people to see, no, if every, I believe if every child had this kind of rich discourse from the time they're 3 or 4, all kids would be a lot more developed intellectually, uh, by the time they hit adolescence and adulthood. And so, you know, my campaign is to get people to see that this organic natural process is actually the, basis of real intellectual development. So yes, I would confirm that in a big way. You're muted, I can't hear you.

Oh yeah, sorry about that. Could you say a little about how this awareness of the process being organic shapes the expectations you have every week coming to the video? I'm thinking Specifically, maybe I can imagine someone saying, okay, I'm gonna ask about building a house like you just did, but my expectation is that Alana is gonna have to think about analytically all this, all the steps of building the house, and I'm gonna push on that, and if she veers away from that, I'm gonna return her. But instead, you let the conversation flow where she wanted it to go. As well, right, without having hardline expectations. And my intuition is that it's because of your realization that the process is organic. But would you say why, why it's the case that you don't—

Yeah, so just to be concrete, so in this case, um, I quickly saw that, you know, based on her experience of using probably Legos, she got the bricks part of building a house. That made sense. Um, you know, I pushed a little bit and She hadn't thought a lot about plumbing. Clearly she doesn't know a lot about plumbing. And I could have given her a kind of a didactic lecture on what goes into plumbing. But I thought, you know, she's honestly thinking through this building a house. She's enjoying the thought. You know, I saw her eyes light up and she was kind of having fun. How would I build a house? And so I thought instead of going into kind of a didactic, Alana, this is how you actually build a house. But no, let's, let's kind of go into the joy she is feeling at kind of building things. And that's why I got into survival. You know, could you, could you hunt and live on your own? Could a group of kids do this on their own? You know, and so for me, I was kind of pushing the frontier, not of the didactic lesson of building a house, but okay, she understands the building a house this well without much information. She'll get the information sooner or later. Again, by the way, with respect to getting the information, now that she's curious about how houses are built, now that she's thought about how houses are built, she's going to be way more receptive to observing plumbing. Oh, that's interesting. Um, and, but then I wanted to go with the frontier of joy, so to speak, in terms of, yeah, let's play around with this. What could I do? And what could a group of kids and I do? And she, I, you know, I was, for me, her eyes lighting up, That's, that's where I'm going. So I'm much more guided by what are interesting bigger problems she could solve that she's having fun solving. So for me, it very much is sort of an intuitive interpersonal dynamic rather than any didactic interest at all. Does that, does that resonate for you?

Yeah, very much. And I think it's very interesting to highlight on joy. I saw another parallel thing that happened in the way you move the conversation forward in that Yes, all of a sudden you started talking about examples of kids achieving survival success, and you ended with a suggestion of a story of an actual young person surviving by themselves in the wild. And I thought, well, that's actually very interesting because that is maybe adding the layer of self-confidence, let's say, or of, uh, what would you call it, a more emotional-oriented lesson there or development there. And I wonder if you decided to do that from the beginning, or is that something you just observed? You observed her reaction and you say, okay, let's go with that, let's build up her confidence.

Totally spontaneously. So yeah, um, this is totally spontaneous. Um, I, I am having so much fun going into this with you. I would like to go a lot longer, but both in the interest of keeping these videos short and because I have something else I have to hop to, I'm going to wrap it up now. But it's wonderful to be talking about intellectual dialogue with you again, Francisco. And so let's hopefully have fun doing this again next week, okay?

Yes, it was great to reconnect and I look forward to our next chat.

Okay, bye-bye, take care.