My fellow young people, I want yall to be honest with me and yourselves. When an elder is lecturing you on something, how much of that do you actually take away? For me it’s like 10% My boss was talking to me for 3 hours yesterday. And I was listening, I didn’t just tilt my head to the side and placate him with, “mmhmm, mmhmm, you right”. And he’s one of the least long-winded elders I know. I retained about 70% of what he said.
What he does differently, is he doesn’t just stand there and drill facts into my head, he asks me questions. And I do the same back to him.
He’s told me multiple times I come off as very intelligent. While it’s flattering, I told yall in my disclaimer I’m not that smart, at least I don’t see myself as such. He mainly saw that I like to pick things apart and deconstruct them. I’ve been told I should be a lawyer or therapist because of .
this. It’s a style of questioning called the Socratic method, by yours truly, Socrates
I wish I had more time in these so Ima have to bottom line this. He didn’t believe he had all the answers, he just wanted everyone else to realize they don’t either. He wasn’t a know-it-all who took a side in every debate, he would pick apart your side to get you thinking if it’s really valid?
Thing about him is, he didn’t write anything himself. Everything we know about him is from other people.
So in terms of who exactly he was, it’s blurry. He was born in Athens, Greece around 469 BC. He didn’t have an actual job so he was a bum by today’s standards.
Around 399 BC, he was put on trial for 2 specific charges. Impiety, meaning he refused to believe in the god he was supposed to believe in, and ‘corrupting the youth’. That second one is very interesting. It ain’t like he was some maniacal cult leader telling the kids to run away from their parents and come drink his kool-aid. All he asked them was, “Whatever it is you believe, explain why you believe it”. Apparently that was the worst thing you could do the kids.
There was also the tense political climate since they were coming out of the Peloponnesian war and he had associations on both sides, so it was a little more to it than just him, but overall, the people were sick of him. In this trial he had a famous speech called the ‘Apology’. I’m not getting into that for now, he was just defending himself and his mindset. He was sentenced to death by majority decision, by forced consumption of poison.
He was killed for trying to get people to think. Again, there were complex political tensions at that time too, but that is pretty much the ‘threat’ the state believed they were neutralizing.
Despite my praise for him, I’m not saying this is the only way to find knowledge. It’s cool to expose someone else’s ignorance, but we don’t gain much knowledge from it either. It’s good for pointing out the gaps, but we still got to fill in those gaps too.
I know I missed a lot with this. His Apology could be a whole post itself. This is mainly setting the foundation for my concern with the public education system and the current pedagogy we’re using to teach our kids. I would really like to know why his trial isn’t a regular part of the history curriculum.
I kinda know the answer, and I’m sure yall do too, but I want to be able to put an explanation behind it outside of just stating it. Moving on.
Grant Abraham 