On The Socratic Education

Dustin Sebell has written an excellent book on Xenophon—the most thorough and comprehensive account of Book IV of the Memorabilia known to me. He develops his argument powerfully, rigorously, and his conclusions about the character, methods and goals of the Socratic education are compelling. Book IV has often been described—not without reason—as dull and insipid. Sebell succeeds in showing, however, that while Socrates’s education of the young Euthydemos is indeed a caricature, a careful reader can discover through that caricature the core of the Socratic education. In my view, the most important contribution of the book is to offer a masterful explanation of how and why Socrates often chose to educate good natures indirectly, not through dialogue but by making them the silent witnesses of the “education” of youths who could not be truly enlightened. By revealing his thought “with a view to” Euthydemos—the ungifted pupil of Memorabilia IV—Socrates was simultaneously able to adumbrate his genuine thoughts to good natures (36). And Sebell explains convincingly the reasons for Socrates’s indirect pedagogy.