Is Inquiry Learning Educational Malpractice?

A Use Case for Socratic Learning

When I was in 6th grade, I remember a long unit on pendulums (a week? two?). We were given these 24 inch tall pendulums with a range of different weights and shapes and told to observe any patterns we saw. For the first day and part of the second is was cool to play around with them and watch the hypnotic back and forth. But after awhile, it became boring. At the end, the teacher explained what we were supposed to have seen (ideally we were supposed to figure out the regularities that led to the equations describing the motion of a pendulum). My team and I didn’t come close to figuring out any equations. Any regularities we saw seemed pretty obvious and banal. After the first day or so of fun, it seemed like a total waste of time.

One of my favorite educational accounts on Twitter is Justin Skycak, who is as hard-assed as it gets with respect to structured learning. Unlike many pedagogues who preach about the “science of learning,” Skycak is a serious learner himself, who taught himself most of an undergraduate college math major while still in high school. I’m exploring using Math Academy, where he serves as Chief Quant, as our math program at The Socratic Experience. In a recent Tweet, he cited two articles I often see cited to dismiss discovery and inquiry learning, “Should There Be a Three Strikes Rule Against Pure Discovery Learning” and “Why Minimal Guidance During Instruction Does Not Work: An Analysis of the Failure of Constructivist, Discovery, Problem-Based, Experiential, and Inquiry-Based Teaching.” Both summarize a vast literature showing that implementations of these forms of teaching do not produce measurable learning gains combined with literature from cognitive science showing why they do not produce learning gains. From the perspective of such “science of learning” advocates, it is an open-and-shut case: Children need direct instruction. Anything else is educational malpractice.

At the same time, I lead a virtual school in which students are engaged in Socratic conversation for 2-4 hours per day and am co-developing a course on Socratic parenting to support parents in having intellectual conversations with their children. Am I engaged in educational malpractice?

The reconciliation of my enthusiasm for Justin’s work and my enthusiasm for Socratic dialogue involves understanding very different use cases for the two pedagogies along with very different mechanisms for learning.

Talent Development through Deliberate Practice Rather than Schooling

First, one more area where Justin and I are in radical agreement: The future should shift towards talent development through deliberate practice rather than schooling.

Excellence across domains is built up through a daily commitment of improvements through deliberate practice. One must be focused, motivated, and live good habits. And whatever one is doing, one is re-enforcing all of one’s systems by means of the activity itself. If you are scrolling on your phone for 8 hours per day (most teens), then you are re-enforcing your propensity to scroll. If you are engaging in a lazy, careless form of practice, whether it is athletic, cognitive, musical, or whatever, then you are re-enforcing the careless habits you’ve already got. If you are constantly working to optimize every aspect of your performance, with appropriate feedback mechanisms and attention to the details of your performance where you will gain the most through optimization, then you will achieve excellence over time.

Easy, right?

Except very few people have the motivation. For those that have the motivation to achieve excellence in their mathematics education, get started with Math Academy now.

The same is true for those who are ready for intense deliberate practice with respect to software development, digital marketing, baseball, ballet, historical research, essay writing, woodworking, mechanical repairs, machine tooling, or anything else. If you (or your child) is ready to go all in, go all in.

Motivating Excellence

If you are Skycak, you may be motivated to learn university mathematics on your own in high school. But that fact does absolutely nothing for those of us focused on developing educational programs for children.

The fact is, by high school, the vast majority of students are not motivated to learn school content (According to Gallop, 66% are not engaged in learning in high school). Thus insofar as the “science of learning” people have a robust set of pedagogical and cognitive science based tools for educating people who want to learn the content, those tools do not address the more fundamental issue of the majority who are not motivated.

Richard Ryan and Edward Deci’s original work on Self-Determination Theory focus on the following as the foundation for self-determined motivation:

1. Relatedness

2. Autonomy

3. Competence

Ryan and Deci provide an excellent analysis of why students are not motivated in school,

Learning traditionally was nested within personal relationships and activities meaningful within a larger community. It took place in the context of people to whom one was attached or strongly related, and its content was nonarbitrary. It concerned the stuff of life that was significant to adults.

By contrast, today's schools provide a remarkable experiment in decontextualization. Children are isolated from adults and, to a large degree, from children of other ages, creating youth and school cultures that are out of touch with the work and social worlds of adults. Learning is expected to occur, then, apart from the interpersonal contexts that have traditionally provided the support for internalization.

We can try to produce external motivation through incentives (I completely support Roland Fryer’s work on this). But given such radical decontextualization from the environment of evolutionary adaptation, ultimately creating learning environments that are more aligned with human nature will be a bigger win.

Humans Seek Their Niche

Humans are niche-seeking social creatures.

Judith Rich Harris's book No Two Alike provides an analysis of why the personalities of identical twins differ as much as they do. There are two key mechanisms she uses to explain this:

A. A socialization system, which amounts to cultures or subcultures.

B. A status seeking system, through which individuals from a young age seek to optimize their status by identifying niches within which they can compete successfully.

Thus even with identical genetics, the social environment in which human beings find themselves leads to status seeking within that culture by optimizing status within a niche within that subculture.

How does this relate to motivation in schools? Well, our motivation fundamentally depends on relationships, and we optimize for a niche within the social environments we find ourselves. Some optimize for math geek, others for jock, others for goth, etc. Insofar as the peer status system is the most powerful motivational force in standard schools, with the exception of those who have chosen to optimize status as a geek, there is little or no motivation to excel academically. Indeed, in some student peer niches, there may be an incentive to attempt to appear stupider than one is (e.g. the pressure some black students feel not to “act white” by doing well in school).

The typical student wants to do as little effort as possible in order to get the grades they require for external reasons (e.g. get into college, maintain eligibility for sports, not get in trouble with their parents, graduate, etc.). For most students in most public schools, the game is that students do as little learning as possible (insofar as learning requires effort) in order to get the best grade they can. The “science of learning” is perfectly irrelevant in such a situation for all but the geeks (and not even for many of them insofar as most of them don’t need to put out much additional effort to maintain their status as a geek).

Redesigning School for Motivating Diverse Niches

While not a completely general solution (we need a diverse educational marketplace to serve all children), I’ve designed The Socratic Experience to serve the needs of creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual children. Our high school STEM program, in particular, provides more motivating pathways for most students. Creative and entrepreneurial students have much more practical STEM pathways related to the exploration of, for instance, innovations in material science (so many new materials being created every year providing new opportunities to create and enterprise) and decision science (all students are interested in making better decisions) on the science front. On the math front, both personal and business finance, including spreadsheet fluency, are far more relevant to their needs. Meanwhile the intellectual students can take Math Academy and accelerate mathematically through deliberate practice.

Meanwhile, with respect to the substance of their creative and entrepreneurial projects, we offer elective courses in art, video production, audio engineering, creative writing/narrative development, generative AI, game design, photography, coding/software development, digital marketing, entrepreneurship, etc. The students are very interested in these nuts-and-bolts courses related to their own goals. We also provide mentoring for creative and entrepreneurial projects and a showcase for student projects twice per year.

Because students are motivated, many of them do work to achieve excellent in their chosen domains. To take earning an income as the most obvious metric for many teenagers (especially boys), many of them are highly focused on learning skills on which they receive an ROI. Our top teenage earners are making more than six figures in high school.

But what to do about “language arts” and “social studies,” typically required in high schools?

This is where our Socratic Humanities shines, both with respect to motivation and effectiveness.

Learning to Read, Speaking, Thinking, and Writing in Socratic Seminars

I love learning but hate school. Why? In part because math was glacially slow for me; I could easily have done two years per year. But at least I got the point of math. But “language arts”? Write an essay on the symbolism of the river in Huck Finn? What? Why? Who does this, any way?

And yet as an adult, being highly proficient at reading, speaking, thinking logically, and writing are all super powers. There are very few careers where one’s proficiency with language doesn’t matter at all. The ability to read and understand anything; the ability to listen and discuss complex ideas in real time; the ability to organize one’s thoughts and defend them on the basis of reason and evidence; and the ability to transfer the thoughts to the written word with more formal and rigorous reasoning and citations or links to evidence. The challenge is that the payoff for high quality verbal skills is not as immediately obvious as it is for learning to code or digital marketing.

Our Socratic Humanities is an effective replacement for language arts (and much of social studies, but I’ll focus on verbal skills here).

First, the basic structure: In all of our Socratic Humanities classes, the basic structure is that students either have read a text outside of class or they will read a selection together in class. Most of our texts are classics, including Western classics, Asian classics, American classics, etc. The goal is not to “master” the thought of a particular author. Instead, based on selections, we work to understand the basic worldview and arguments presented by the author within the limited text we read and then decide if we, as individuals, agree with the perspective therein. We often apply the perspective to our own lives.

For instance, in Plato’s Gorgias, the character Socrates argues that we should bring our friends to justice if they engage in wrongdoing. Our conversations within the text focus on understanding Plato’s language and the various arguments therein, all of which are more complex than most students have previously encountered. This may be a scholarly activity. But we can apply the question to their lives by asking, “If your friend had been driving drunk, would you report him?” This kind of interpersonal question about their lives is extremely engaging, often resulting in passionate debates.

Where is the “inquiry” teaching? Well, we certainly don’t tell them what moral conclusion they should have (though Socrates himself is certainly a moralist). Moreover, just as humans have an innate cognitive ability to learn language as an infant, we have an innate cognitive ability to make moral judgments. In addition, students have abundant personal experience with respect to friends, trust, betrayal, and moral conflicts. We are not asking them to discover the formulae determining the motion of pendula. We are asking them to discuss a topic on which they have an abundant experiential knowledge base (along with a genetic predisposition).

At the same time, insofar as the norms of the class are such that all positions must be defended with reason and evidence, it is not just a vapid expression of opinion. The leader, who must be an effective reasoner herself, must ask rigorous questions to tease out inconsistencies. Very quickly other students internalize the norms and interrogate each other as they perceive weaknesses in each other’s positions (Socrates was famously convicted of “corrupting the youth” because young men copied his questioning style and went around interrogating, and embarrassing, prominent men in Athens). Thus while we do provide instruction in logical argumentation at various points, for the most part students learn to argue by being placed in an environment in which everything they say might be challenged. Because often the conversation is fast based, in order to participate students must become adept at thinking on their feet (an invaluable skill for all future business meetings).

The ongoing argumentation provides a foundation for teaching essay writing. In real time, students are staking out positions. For instance,

Student: “As long as my friend didn’t hurt anyone, I wouldn’t tell on them.”

Teacher: “What if they didn’t realize they hurt someone. Are you at fault for not telling on them?”

Student: “I can say I didn’t know.”

Teacher: “If your mother was killed by a drunk teen and you had a friend that had known that that teen had driven drunk before but had not told anyone, would you be angry?”

Student: “I would be furious.”

Teacher: “Does that imply that you would have an obligation to report a friend for driving drunk?”

Student: “Maybe. I guess so. Probably so.”

Without evaluating the student’s particular arguments, note that the student is generating a potential thesis for an essay. For instance, they might end up writing an essay with the thesis, “Why You Should Report Your Friend Even If He Didn’t Harm Anyone.”

We still provide direct instruction on essay structure. Mastering formal argumentation in an essay is a complex skill. But as opposed to a random language arts prompt such as “Write an essay on the symbolism of the river in Huck Finn,” we now have a morally loaded topic on which the student has strong opinions and has rehearsed, in dialogue, some of the elements of the argument. In addition, over time the daily immersion in an environment in which every claim may be contested by someone else is invaluable in essay writing - students become better at knowing when they need to provide reasoning and evidence because they have thousands of hours of exposure to other people’s demand for additional argumentation.

In foreign language learning, while the “science of learning” approach may be effective for classroom-based instruction, it is abundantly clear that full immersion in the target language, combined with basic instruction in the fundamentals, is ultimately the path to fluency in the target language. Likewise, I see our daily Socratic intellectual immersion as the path to fluency in being an articulate, thoughtful person who can develop and defend their own perspective based on reason and evidence.

With respect to reading difficult texts, a key strategy we teach is the Socratic fundamental, “Know what you know, know what you don’t know, and then know what you need to know.” When students begin encountering unfamiliar dense prose such as the opening line to Federalist 10,

“Among the numerous advantages promised by a well constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”

Their initial response may simply be bewilderment. But if one asks them to highlight terms they don’t understand, they might mention only “faction” as the rest of the individual words are fairly common. But looking up the word “faction” in a dictionary is unlikely to solve the problem. In the beginning, we might work clause by clause to make sense of it (in itself an important strategy for tackling complex texts), working with them very actively to work towards coherent meaning.

There is certainly an “inquiry” aspect, “What do you think this sentence is saying?” and allowing hypotheses. Sometimes a more sophisticated reader will get pretty far along with an initial interpretation. But the teacher is very much there to guide the process, and provide didactic content as needed. For instance, we would typically provide background on Madison and The Federalist Papers before getting started, which would typically provide them with an understanding of “a well constructed union” before starting to read, then an explanation of “faction” beyond the dictionary definition that will allow them to pull the sentence together for themselves.

But over time, students become more sophisticated readers, better at identifying what they know, what they don’t know, and what they need to know on their own. Many people have suggested that “Asking great questions” is a key 21st century skill. Constantly discovering “what they need to know” leads to the habit of identifying gaps in one’s own understanding and thus the internal signal that one needs to ask a question to fill in that gap. I think most people who have not experienced years of habituation in these conversations would be surprised at who instinctive it becomes over time. We are learning how to learn, at least with respect to deciphering complex texts and learning how to learn new concepts.

To get into the pedagogical weeds just a bit more, often I use questions to engage in a form of concept teaching. For instance, after getting into the nature of Madison’s concern with factions, I might ask,

Is a political party a faction?

Is an ethnic group a faction?

Is an interest group a faction?

Is an age cohort a faction?

The idea is to get them to apply the concept in various contexts, and explore the operational boundaries of the concept from within Madison’s conceptual framework. This is a high level cousin to defining concepts by examples:

Is a beagle a dog?

Is a poodle a dog?

Is a horse a dog?

Is a wolf a dog?

Thus with younger children I might ask questions getting them to think about easy exemplars of the concept, an easy exemplar of a counter-example, and then an interesting boundary case for stimulating a discussion in which competing perspectives are stated with corresponding arguments.

Finally, the deeper Socratic impulse is to seek consistency and coherence of understanding everywhere. This leads to questioning of one’s own ideas and those of others. It leads to an orientation towards inquiry and truth in all of life. The daily social dynamic of Socratic immersion habituates students in this way of thinking and relating to the world.

A quick personal note on “learning to learn,” a concept widely ridiculed in the “science of learning” community because they believe that everything must be taught, that there is no “learning to learn” separate from learning content. That is certainly not my experience. One tutor at St. John’s said that the ideal foreign language exam was one in which one didn’t know what language one would be tested on, but simply given a passage in Polish, Mandarin, Swahili, or whatever and then given an appropriate grammar and lexicon to figure it out. That was my mental model for what we did at St. John’s: We’d be given Aristotle, Kant, Copernicus, Einstein, etc. and just be expected to figure it out using the Socratic dictum, Know what you know, know what you don’t know, and focus on figuring out what you need to know.

Applying this approach, well developed after four years of such work, I went to graduate school, took one course in economics, and based on debating ideas recruited future Nobel laureate Gary Becker to be my dissertation advisor, who wrote me a recommendation letter for the academic job market; I later took a test on pedagogy in Alaska and got the top score in the state after reading one book, never having taken an education course; and later led a graduate biochemistry class on a six page technical paper which took me 8 hours to read but after which I understood more deeply than all of the graduate biochem students. When I met classmates from Harvard who had stayed there (I left after one year to transfer to St. John’s), I was much more confident about learning material without being formally taught. I’m very good at figuring out unfamiliar academic material on my own.

Making Learning Meaningful in a Related Community

Going back to Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory,

Furthermore, we submit that the kind of needs that are expressed by students (and that can energize their involvement in school) are largely of an interpersonal nature. In educational contexts and tasks where students experience support for their autonomy, and where they feel connected to and supported by significant others, they are likely to be highly motivated.

The daily Socratic dialogues are deeply relational. We are exceptionally good at warm and intellectual, respecting autonomy of thought and rigorous Socratic dialogue while also being mutually respectful and fully present. I describe this as “Buberian Socratic.”

With respect to the creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual niches, we could design a program in which students strictly engage in their professional work related to their niche. And, indeed, a few students leave our program because they prefer to avoid the daily Socratic dialogue.

That said, most really enjoy the intellectual stimulation and the sense of community. And insofar as they would be required to take some kind of Language Arts classes at any school, this is much more appealing than are conventional English classes most places.

It also develops their sense of personal identity. In this age of radical fragmentation and hostility, with endless public debates and attacks on those with different beliefs, they value the opportunity to consider who they are and what they stand for morally and politically. I believe that top down dogmatic belief of whatever sort (religious, political, ideological, etc.) is no longer sustainable in a world in which we are all exposed to an immense range of alternative perspectives. It is far healthier and more satisfying to spend secondary school exploring a wide range of perspectives and, very gradually, coming to determine who we are. St. John’s College, where students discuss the classics of Western civilization for four years, has been described as having one’s most sacred beliefs ripped to shreds every week for four years. Students who have been through this will not have fragile egos, nor will they fall prey to this or that ideological fashion.

The end result is the development of a personal identity as a teen in which one’s intellectual commitments are far more thoroughly considered than is the case with the vast majority of adults.

Understanding Uses Cases

For people who are ready to commit to learning a particular skill or knowledge domain in the most efficient manner possible, Justin Skycak’s approach is as good as it gets.

But for making sense of the conflicting, chaotic, unstructured reality in which we live; for building close intellectual relationships through dialogue; for becoming an articulate defender of one’s own perspective in real time; for immersive experience in intellectual dialogue; for understanding the extraordinarily diverse ways in which other people understand the world; and for developing a coherent personal identity on which to build one’s life, classroom Socratic dialogue is more effective.

Once a student does have a direction towards which they are ready to commit to deliberate practice, I’m all in on that. We do cover the key concepts of James Clear’s Atomic Habits, deliberate practice, and various other components of achieving peak performance so that students are equipped to know what it takes. We discuss examples in their own lives of how effective they are at implementing these strategies in their chosen domains and provide coaching for improving performance when they plateau. Thus again, our ultimate purpose as an educational institution is talent development, not schooling. And some students get to the point at which they are done with the Socratic component and are ready to dedicate their lives to excellence within a specific domain: Math, business, digital marketing, novel writing, etc. Hurrah!

But vanishingly few are ready for such single-minded dedication before their last few years of high school. In the meantime, developing proficiency in reading, speaking, thinking logically, and writing along with the extensive additional benefits of Socratic classes outlined above is a more powerful way to develop a child’s intellect while creating a robustly positive personal identity than are most conventional high school classes. Thus as they explore various creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual paths of interest with capable practitioners and caring, mature mentors, they are developing a solid foundation for whatever direction they choose to go in life.