Socrates

Socratic Seminar is a structured classroom practice that promotes critical and creative thinking, intellectual curiosity, collaboration, and scholarly habits of mind. The main goal of Socratic Seminar is to build deep conceptual understandings of texts and ideas, where the word "text" is used loosely to refer to a piece of writing, visual art, music, movement, etc. In seminar, the teacher shifts his or her role to that of facilitator or questioner, so that the students can move from passive reception of knowledge to actively constructing meaning and understanding. They will build on others' ideas, cite the text, ask questions and voice their own opinions. With practice, the students become self-sufficient and together they can tackle even the most challenging texts.

Participants in Socratic Seminar are meant to engage in dialogue, which is different than both debate or discussion. Debates and discussions are both fine practices and they have their own goals and purposes. Debates are typically characterized by two sides in oppositional or competitive roles, where each team attempts to prove their entrenched view. Dialogue is characterized by a cooperative atmosphere, where all of the participants attempt to work together to form greater shared understandings. Classroom discussions often look similar, but they are typically meant to broaden a topic, whereas Socratic Seminars are meant to deepen.

Socrates and Three Generations of State :

A philosopher is assessed not by the beauty of his words, but by looking into whether his objectives were achieved or not. His arguments on how a more republican and disciplined State could be constructed were considered comments from shade and shine against the Athenian State which was indisciplined, no republican and steeped in corruption and favouritism. Such was the distance between the State and him that he was executed for this reason.

When it was the time of Plato, his student, follower and friend, Plato instituted the Academy and moved classes from the Socrates' wonted market place to a fixed walled space which had the novelty of teachers coming to a fixed place where students only needed to go and where classes progressed according to a predetermined syllabus, all these replacing the ancient system of students residing with the teacher in his house, and later coming to be known as the academic system of education. Knowledge became such fashionable that the aristocratic Athenian noble young men could not be married away if they had not studied in the Academy. Socrates, through Plato was nearing the State.

Though the Greek school of thought from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Alexander to Anaximander was each one of them brilliant, Aristotle was the most lucky to get equipped with what Socrates predicted as the prerequisite essential for building a model republic - a soldier student. In his times the Academician thoughts had become such pervasive and persuasive that the King Philip of the just-across-the-strait semi barbarian state of Macedonia invited Aristotle to be the teacher of his intelligent son Alexander. The rest is history. Thus Socrates became the State just in three generations which was fast. Thus in achieving his objectives Socrates was a good philosopher.

Socrates and "care of the self"

Young Socrates also knew the Sophists and listened to their debates and ceremonial orations. Socrates and the Sophists neither science nor Sophistry, however, could answer a new philosophic question that struck him.

The earlier Greek thinkers had been concerned almost wholly with physics and cosmology until the Sophists suggested that what should be done instead was to teach young men skills to satisfy their natural self-interest.

Instead, Socrates wondered: "What is a 'self'?" Although "Know Thyself!" was one of three sayings carved on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the directive proved difficult to carry out. The so-called scientific views of the time particularly that of atomism, defined the self as a physical organ that responded to environmental pressure. Socrates felt, however, that the Sophists, for all their talk of self-interest, had little curiosity about the status of a self; they assumed that it was merely an isolated centre constantly greedy for more pleasure, prestige, and power.

The Sophists further thought that the values that people advocated were all conventional, varying from one culture to another, and that no one would ever act against his or her own interest, regardless of how many people talked as though they would. This complex of ideas offered little to explain human nature and excellence. Socrates' Later Life and Thought Socrates, setting about his search for the self, was convinced of the importance of his quest. Until educators and teachers knew what human excellence was, he thought, they were engaging in false pretences by claiming that they knew how to improve students or societies. Socrates believed that objective patterns, or "forms," exist that define human excellence, that these are neither culturally relative nor subjective, and that philosophic inquiry could discover them. In the period after Athenian defeat in the Peloponnesian War, however, the political leaders did not want to be awakened; uncritical patriotism seemed to them what they and Athens needed. In an attempt to frighten Socrates away, they threatened to bring him to trial for "impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens." Socrates stayed and stood trial. In his Apology, Plato reconstructs his speech to the jury in defence of his beliefs. He was convicted and executed in 399 BC.