By Dr. Lisa Dunne
*This blog is excerpted from Dr. Dunne’s presentation at the 2024 Annual TRACS Transregional Association of Christian Colleges and Schools Convention in Dallas.
Maybe you’ve heard the stat that the average 4-year-old asks 437 questions a day. What happens to those questions—and that curiosity—between the toddler years and the “school” years? The answer is not exactly flattering for traditional education.
From the vantage point of a homeschooling professor who taught my own kids at home and other people’s kids in college, I noted for many years, across numerous landscapes and socioeconomic models, that there existed a dramatic difference in how homeschoolers learned. Homeschoolers had joy and curiosity, whereas students of the system were often bored and frustrated. Homeschoolers had excitement and enthusiasm, whereas students of the system were often unmotivated to read, dream, think, or even care.
The traditional system of education is broken, yes, but I believe that America’s education crisis is a solvable problem.
One of our key elements in the founding of CVCU was our educational methodology. We wanted a model of education that partnered with students’ curiosity instead of squelching it, that sparked conversation rather than silenced questions. For this format, we turned to Socratic methodology. Webster defines the format as “a philosophical method of using questioning to elicit a clear expression of a truth supposed to be knowable by all rational beings.” A clear expression of truth! What better definition of a purposeful educational methodology, especially for believers?
Some people worry that when we say Socratic method, it means that the classroom is a place of mayhem and chaos, that there is no anchor of truth, no one in charge, and students assert their rights and beliefs and their own version of “truth.” But that’s actually the opposite of what really happens in the Socratic classroom.
Let’s step back to the macro level. When we think about the greatest role model who ever walked the earth, Jesus, we see a fascinating use of scaffolding in his educational methodology.
How did Jesus answer his disciples’ questions? He asked them more questions. He asked them open-ended questions that couldn’t be answered in a simple yes or no. He made them think. In fact, the NT records between 173 and 307 question responses (some say 339 depending on how you define them). Of all those, he is only recorded as directly answering 3 to 8 of the 183 to 339, again depending on your definitions, and even those responses had embedded questions of sorts.
So what’s the big deal about questions?
Let’s return to that idea, the stat, that the average 4-year-old asks 437 questions a day. Why? They’re curious. They’re in a developmental stage of knowledge acquisition. They are learning to connect mental dots. They’re learning, quite literally, to think.
Now, Jesus is clearly not in need of an answer to his questions. He is omniscient and omnipotent. So who are his questions intended for?
Well, questions in general have a specific purpose. They require the listener to participate in the process of understanding. Instead of just communicating knowledge, questions sound the depths of understanding. Unlike lectures, questions don’t just deposit information; they seek transformation.
What’s the value of the question?
Children have what developmentalists call an epistemic curiosity, a need for understanding. As a result, they ask a lot of questions. That’s good. That’s natural. But a study by Susan Engel in the Harvard Educational Review shows that once kids start school, their questions drop from one every two minutes to less than one every two hours. This should concern us.
At home and at school, if we’re honest, we might find ourselves shutting down questions because they’re inconvenient. After all, we reason, we’ve got a lesson plan to get through; we have work to get done. Neil Postman said in The End of Education that children enter school as question marks and leave as periods. Educators are not inspiring curiosity, he insisted; they are crushing it, destroying it.
John Taylor Gatto said in his brilliant expose Dumbing Us Down that government monopoly schools are structurally unreformable; they are doing exactly what they were designed to do, creating drones and robots. Is that our moral mandate as educators? Is that our goal?
Let’s not use our Christian platforms to recreate what is broken in the secular world. Let’s build a new model, a biblical model of education for the next generation. Let’s use methodologies that honor the individual student, that strip away the one-size-fits-none model of traditional education.
Forgive the reductionistic POV, but over 25 years as a professor and a homeschool leader, I have come to believe that all educational philosophies can be boiled dow to two branches: inculcation and inquiry. One seeks to deposit and one seeks to draw out. Both are a mirror of the educator’s philosophy and beliefs about herself, her students, and her world.
Inculcation is the act of influencing someone to learn by repetition, getting the student to regurgitate what is important to you, the educator. It comes from the latin word inculcare, which means to “tread on” or to “ram down.” So that’s encouraging.
Inculcation is what I would call teacher-centric education.
The other approach is inquiry-based education, which encourages students to think through and solve problems, to think critically, to become self-directed learners.
Inquiry-based learning is what I would call student-centric education.
For most Christian educational institutions, and even most secular ones, student-centricity is likely somewhere in the mission, vision, or values. And most of us have probably at some point poetically quoted William Butler Yeats: Education is not “the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”
And yet, more often than not, modern education inculcates instead of inquires. It pours in instead of draws out. It tells students what to think, not how to think. An honest look at your institutional methodology will tell you if you’re part of the solution or the problem.
Perhaps the most powerful aspect of inquiry-based methodology for today’s generation is that it challenges assumptions. The troubling stats on GenZs rank them as the most anxious, depressed, atheist generation in the history of our nation. What are the top two reasons for their atheism? They believe a loving God would not allow suffering, and they believe science and the Bible contradict—the direct spawn of public education’s offspring.
The Socratic method presents the opportunity for hearing what a student is really thinking (or not thinking), and as a result, the opportunity for discipleship emerges. You won’t likely discover what’s in a student’s heart on a multiple choice Scantron exam, but you can most certainly assess and address that heart in a Socratic classroom.
So, how do we apply Socratic methods in the modern world of education?
In our Academic Rescue Mission homeschool campuses, we say “circles not rows, dialogue not lecture.” The architecture of the class is set up to be relational, inviting, connected. The professor (or parent mentor in the younger grades) assigns reading, including seminal works in the field or GE course, and students write reading summaries by hand in their reading notebook. Outside the classroom, assignments are meaningful and career-focused, not punitive, not busy-work.
Inside the classroom, the dialogue centers on “the great questions” and student dialogue, exactly like we do in the homeschool model.
But be aware: Socratic methodology will make you feel and think. If you shut down your heart and turned off your brain long ago, expect to be uncomfortable as you power back up to the human experience.
In his book The Religious Affections, Jonathan Edwards said, “For although to true religion there must indeed be something else besides affection, yet true religion consists so much IN the affections that there can be no true religion without them. He who has no religious affection is in a state of spiritual death and is wholly destitute of the powerful, quickening, saving influences of the Spirit of God upon his heart.” (page 49)
Paul similarly chastised the Corinthians: I have opened up my heart to you, but you are withholding your affection from me. I speak to you as my children, open wide your heart.
Our words have tremendous power. God designed it thus. Socratic methodology is built on communication, on dialogue, and it offers you the opportunity to be a conduit of hope and healing in your classroom. Labels and lies run deep. Words have the power to edify or to crucify. As adults, we have to choose life and hope and healing for ourselves and for our students.
In the connected conversations of the Socratic model, we have the opportunity for whole-student development. We call it academic discipleship. Who we are will leak out, and again, as Luke 6:40 reminds us, the student will become like the teacher.
The way we treat our students matters. If we show love, respect, kindness AND correction, scaffolding, discipline—the needed balance to those “gentle" nouns, we will model belief in our students’ God-given ability to grow, to succeed.. The intergenerational model of connectivity described in Titus and Timothy is essential for whole-person development.
When we look at the stats on GenZ, it’s clear that we are living in the greatest mission field in the world right now. Students tell me that they want to make friends but they often just don’t know how. It’s hard to move past the artificial lens of social media and video game personas to make healthy attachments. It requires risk, vulnerability, self-disclosure (see my podcast Friendship Formula for more on this topic). What would happen if we created environments of trust and authenticity not only with their professors but with their peers? How would the anxious, depressed, atheist generation shift if it had shoulders to help carry and make sense of its burdens?
If our focus is purely academic in nature, we might impress the world, but we are in danger of mission drift, of spiritual death. Many of us write in our mission statements that we teach the whole student, but our daily practices and distractions with temporary things says otherwise. Often, out of an academic keeping up with the Joneses mentality, we focus our efforts solely on scholarship, often at the expense of spiritual growth.
We delude ourselves if we think that sanitized, secular, soul-less education programs can teach true wisdom or godly character. And at the end of the day, what will it profit a man if he gains the world, yet loses his own soul? If our children are academic legends or sports superstars but they walk away from God, it doesn’t matter how many trophies grace their bookshelves. We didn’t do our job as parents. As educators. As Christians.
We must fix our eyes, as the Apostle Paul said, not on things that are temporal, but on things that are eternal. "Only one life. Twill soon be passed. Only what’s done for Christ will last."
America’s education crisis is a solvable problem. It’s time to build educational models that reflect the tried and true nature of the homeschool formula. Let's look to the greatest Teacher of all time for our instructional methodology. Let’s reclaim education for the next generation. Learn more at AcademicRescueMission.com.
About the Author: Dr. Lisa Dunne is a dynamic, award-winning educator, author, speaker, and an industry disruptor in the field of education. After teaching at the college level for 20 years, she founded 35 national K to 12 homeschool academies as well as a debt-free, mentor-driven, four-year university that is dedicated to rescuing the next generation from the toxic traits of traditional education. Dr. Lisa holds a Ph.D. in human development and Master's degree communication studies and human and organizational systems. She is passionate about the transformative power of Christian education, the primacy of the local church, and the stable family as the cornerstone of healthy culture. She is the author of several books, including The Multigenerational Marketplace,The Science of Social Influence, and Relating through the Lifespan. Her podcast is The Communication Architect, and her weekly radio show MindsetMatters can be heard every Saturday at 10:30pm on KPraise Radio. Her latest book, Outsourced: Why America's Kids Need an Education Revolution, is available at OutsourcedTheBook.com and on Amazon.
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