Teaching

Thaddeus Kozinski, Ph.D.

Professors profess—that is, they use the traditional lecture method—but they also conduct the
more modern practice of the seminar. But what they aim at in their classrooms is the fruitful
combination of the two, even within the same class period, synthesizing top-down, rigidly
structured, instructional transmission of knowledge with free-form, student-led conversation and
inquiry. To best acquire the skills of the liberal artist and the philosophical wisdom that is their
ultimate raison d’etre, the tutorial mode of teaching, incorporating both lecture and seminar but
realizing their dynamic synthesis through Socratic questioning, is the most effective method of
teaching, particularly for undergraduates.

Tutorial connotes either one-on-one instruction, or, at least, a smaller than usual class size. Tutor,
by way of Old French and Middle English, comes from the Latin tueri, “to watch or guard.” In
the tutorial, the professor watches each student, listening carefully to his responses to questions
so as to ascertain his mindset, perspective, and temper of thought; and by this receptive listening
he guards them against the intellectual pitfalls of unexamined assumptions, facile inferences,
unwarranted skepticism, or misplaced dogmatism. This subtle give and take dynamic is possible
neither in the lecture hall nor the seminar table, regardless of size.

A college lecture presents a thesis to students and provides an extended argument in its defense.
Students learn how to follow a long train of logic, and, if the lecture is sound, they come to know
the truth about some aspect of reality. A college seminar poses a question with which students
are invited to grapple, without much intervention or guidance by the professor. Students learn
how to formulate their own opinions, respond sensitively and receptively to alternative
viewpoints, question their own unexamined assumptions, and dialectically engage difficult
questions. Both of these educational tools are effective for learning, but when they are taken to
extremes or employed in isolation from each other, something vital is lost.

Lecture provides contextual and factual information, extended argumentation, and wisdom
gleaned from prolonged study and experience. This kind of systematic, definitive discourse must
inform and guide dialectical, conversational inquiry if it is to be fruitful. But lecture alone can
turn students into passive learners and mere followers of “expert” opinion. Free-flowing seminar
discussion, though an indispensable tool to inculcate the habits of listening, speaking, asserting,
considering, and receiving, can be disorienting to students and suggestive of relativism. Most
questions do have answers, even if only tentative ones open to further questioning. Open-ended
inquiry must ultimately lead to some level of closure else it lead to what Socrates called in the
Phaedo “the greatest evil,” misology, the hatred of argument. Interminable dialectic and
argument with no definite direction or sense of progress teaches students that truth is not just
elusive but perhaps nonexistent. Inquiry should not be preemptively curtailed, of course, but
neither should it be prolonged unnaturally.

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The tutorial method includes the best of both methods in the proper balance. In tutorial, the
teacher does often lecture, usually at the beginning of class, to provide important information and
context. But the bread and butter of the tutorial is the professor’s modeling of inquiry: how to
conduct a careful interpretation of a given text or idea, ask the kinds of questions most relevant
to it, and articulate a defensible argument. Such modeling can include lecture, Socratic
questioning, and seminar discussion, but the key is for the professor to perform not just for but
with students the kind of informed and rigorous rational inquiry most appropriate for the
particular subject matter under investigation, whether literature, mathematics, philosophy,
theology, or history. Such interactive modelling combined with cooperative inquiry is difficult
and sometimes exhausting—it is easier simply to lay out an extended argument and answer
questions, or pose an opening question and sit back—but it is more educationally rewarding for
both student and teacher.

Posing carefully considered questions to students enables them to question their unexamined
opinions and prejudices, and thus to discover truth for themselves. But it trains them to develop
their own carefully considered questions. Answers are not truly answers if they are not preceded
and evoked by authentic and heartfelt questions. Only by first mastering the complex art of
questioning can a student profitably be led to the correct answers and enabled to recognize
inadequate ones. The student transcends uninformed and uncritical opinion, rejects mere
assertion, and obtains justified knowledge and truth. In tutorial, students learn how to become
close readers of texts and independent thinkers without fear of becoming unmoored “free
thinkers”—in other words, habitual skeptics at best, and dogmatic nihilists at worst.

The goal of teacher-modeling is for the students to eventually perform their own independent
inquiries. The teacher may still intervene at times to supplement their humble efforts at close
reading and analysis with his more proficient textual commentary and dialectical acumen, and to
nuance their answers when they are deficient or correct them when they are flat-out wrong.

Finally, tutorial has great benefits not only to students. Often in conversing Socratically with
students, the professor himself is awakened to new and more profound questions, insights, and
truths. When it comes to the Reality itself, mysterious and inexhaustible, we must, professor and
student alike, confess with Socrates that all we know is that we don't know.