Why Universities Use Socratic Dialogue

A university, as opposed to a technical school, does not just teach people a salable skill. Its goals are to teach the methods that lead to self-knowledge, critical thinking skills, citizenship defined in its broadest sense (meaning responsibility for one's locality, state, nation, and globe), and literacy, which is the ability to read and write at a disciplinary level. These skills are essential for leadership in a Republic, Plato argued. By no means are these goals easy to achieve. There is no shortcut to achieving them.

Socratic dialogue is one of the primary methods we use at the university for achieving our goals. 2500 years ago, Socrates invented dialogue as it is still practiced at the university today. Socrates was identified by the oracles as the wisest man in ancient Greece. He was confused by this because he admitted that he knew nothing. How could he be the wisest man if he only knew that he did not know anything? He went to find out - what he discovered was that everyone else thought they knew something, but they had not examined their beliefs and when their beliefs were scrutinized, they fell apart. So Socrates was the wisest man because he didn't hold on to beliefs that went unexamined.