que produce gente pensante, libre, tolerante, y capaz de respetar al que piensa distinto, de dialogar, y de construir consensos que hacen factible la acción común frente a problemas comunes.
In the midst of ample discussions regarding university accreditation and other polemical aspects of our educational system, it is worth reflecting on the methodological approach taken by educational processes, that define their quality to a considerable extent. As many of us know from personal and even bitter experience, it is common among us for students to be asked to memorize facts, dates, definitions and descriptions, then to be asked to repeat all of these like a parrot, and finally, if they are perfectly repeated, to be congratulated for their “academic excellence”. The implicit premise is that “to educate” means to fill students with “knowledge”, described by Paulo Freire, the eminent Brazilian educational philosopher as the “banking” system because it treats the student as though he were a piggy-bank to be stuffed with more and more such “knowledge”. Many of us in education prefer a different approach, first developed by Socrates in ancient Greece. In essence, it involves asking questions and posing challenges that induce the student to seek his or her own answers. The implicit premise here is that what is important is not what is arrogantly transmitted by someone who pretends to “know” to those he contemptuously describes as ignorant, but rather the learning that results from the search for one’s own answers. That learning includes the confidence in his or her own judgments that is acquired by the person who “learns” in that way, and the extraordinary experience of recognizing oneself as the source of one’s own beliefs, free from impositions, dogmatism, and the latter’s almost inevitable corollary, intolerance. An enormous contribution to improving the quality of our education would be made if its evaluation, whether by official institutions or by us, the citizens, were to include assessing the presence of this Socratic method, that produces people who are thoughtful, free, tolerant and able to respect those whose beliefs are different, to dialogue, and to build consensus that makes it possible for us to act in common in the face of common problems.
Prof. Jorje H. Zalles ‘El método socrático produce gente pensante, libre, tolerante y respetuosa.’ The Socratic method produces people who are thoughtful, free, tolerant and respectful.