The Place of Lecture in a Classical Classroom
On my first visit to a classical classroom, I knew that something special was taking place there. The engagement and enthusiasm of the students was palpable, and I was struck by a distinct sense of envy for the teachers privileged to work in such an environment. The students were reading Macbeth, a text I had taught for over a decade, but their willingness to take command of the interpretation, relegating the teacher to the sidelines of the discussion, was something I had never quite seen before. It was obvious that the Socratic approach to the material had engendered in these students a unique interest in their own education.
One consequence of this experience is that I came to regard the Socratic approach as central to the methodology of classical education. The more I tried to learn about the movement, the more I found that others thought the same. But I also found that this high regard for Socratic was often mixed with a rather slight regard for lecture, or, in its more extreme forms, with a hostility for lecture and a belief that it has no place in a classical classroom. I even found some classical educators averse to having the teacher talk for any prolonged period of time. They did not even want them to provide information as context to the reading, like for instance, explaining the background to Socrates’ trial before jumping into the Apology.
Moreover, since taking over as head of a classical program, I’ve found that one of the leading problems our teachers struggle with is how to present their material employing a strictly Socratic approach. A number of them seem to share this sense that the classical teacher ought to be doing no talking in class, that to do so would constitute lecture, and lecture is forbidden. So I have found myself thinking quite a bit recently about the place of lecture in a classical classroom.
I suppose the first and most obvious thing to say is that there is material that can be taught in no other way. Mere “information” certainly does not occupy the place in humanistic instruction that it does in scientific, but there is some of it. Latin declensions, victors of key battles, the doctrinal legacy of certain passages in Scripture – none of these things can be approached in a conversational manner. They simply constitute information that must be transmitted from teacher to student.
I want to say too that the ability to sit and listen to a speaker unfold a topic for half hour is one that we should be cultivating in students. The powers of concentration necessary to follow a complex argument or intricate narrative are the requisite powers of an educated person. Needless to say, in an age of technological distraction, those powers are becoming rarer and rarer among young folks; their cultivation would be another point of distinction for the classical school.
Many of us can remember certain teachers from our own schooling who could keep the class spellbound with their ability to bring the subject matter alive. There are several I remember who were instrumental in awakening my love of literature at an early age. It would have been a real impingement on their talents, and on the growth of their students, to compel these teachers to hold their tongues at all times, and not share what they had to share. An excellent speaker in class can do as much to draw students into the material as a well-directed conversation.
After all, a Socratic conversation can go very poorly, and if not directed in the proper fashion, can actively inhibit the students’ proper intellectual growth. Conversations that meander aimlessly, that consistently reach no sort of resolution on the topic, insinuate into the students’ minds a sense that no answers are to be found to the meaningful questions, and this sense can lead to a relativistic outlook over time. I suspect that the valorization of Socratic among classical schoolers sometimes has the effect of blinding us to this pitfall. It takes great skill to avoid this outcome, as it takes great skill to present material to young minds in an engaging fashion.
Undoubtedly, lecture will play a more prominent role in the earlier stages of students’ education than the later. Middle schoolers, and even high school underclassmen, will need more guidance as they go through their material than the upperclassmen. The overall design of the curriculum should be structured in such a way that the students are being prepared to take over more and more of the classroom speaking time, so that by Junior and Senior year it would be quite common for the teacher to simply turn the reigns of the conversation over the students. But they must be trained to that competence first.
Part of this training means observing faculty demonstrate effective interpretation. As teachers lecture, they are modelling good reading and speaking habits – habits which the students can emulate when it is their turn to interpret. Ideally, these lectures will serve as a preparative to discussion, rendering that discussion more grounded in evidence. So for instance, a debate over the moral tenor of the deeds of Christopher Columbus or Hernan Cortes should be preceded by a reading of some relevant documents and accounts, but also by an overview of the events relevant to such an evaluation. In such a case, the two modes of instruction – lecture and discussion – are complimentary. They enhance one another – the lecture focuses the discussion, the discussion brings home the significance of the lecture content.
Competent educators do not use the words “always” and “never.” They are engaged in an art, after all, not a science. “More” and “less” is the terminology applicable to our art. I think it is undoubtedly true that classical educators use Socratic conversation much more than their peers in the standard model, that they want their instructors spending much less time feeding information to students. But this bent should not be mistaken for a wholesale prohibition on lecture, much less a denigration of its genuine uses. When we can appreciate those uses, then we can train our teachers to lecture effectively, just as we train them to lead discussions effectively.