The Socrates Experience

The Socratic Oath

Serve education as life’s truth

Turn away no one from education as a human entitlement

Let education speak clearly for justice

Challenge the educational poverty of prejudice and persecution

Speak educational truth to power and to those profiting from educational privilege

Defend the right for all to find meaning through the joy of learning

Pursue the vocation of education that ‘freedom is to learn’

Education sustains all human communities

Absence of education threatens all life, including life as yet unknown to us

Meaningful education is the examined life that asks questions

Questions bring the mind into relation with itself

The space this opens is called critical thinking

Where there is injustice, power and privilege will suppress critical thinking

But even here, freedom demands to live its own truth in the examined life.

Education serves freedom because ‘freedom is to learn’

I assume I know things

Questioning makes me doubt them

This the Socratic experience

Such experience is exhilarating, for I lose my ground

I lose knowledge to the questions, but I am richer for it

And then, here we go again…

Until I am able to live with the questions

And to live as the questions

Then the Socratic experience becomes a way of life

I know that I do not know. But I am not empty. I am abundant

I will go by the way which is the way of learning…