Teacher Forces Student To Think About The Claim That J.K. Rowling Is A Bigot

This clip is one of the reasons why J.K. Rowling was trending last night on Twitter and it is pretty incredible. Watch as a student starts off just blindly accepting that J.K. Rowling is a bigot, to eventually realizing that he really can’t find anything to support the claim: This is utterly brilliant. A student accuses J.K. Rowling of being transphobic. This teacher skilfully dissects the claim and challenges it by asking questions. He teaches not what to think, but how to think critically. Watch until the end. You see the epiphany in real-time.

The lawyers in the audience will be very quick to recognize what this is: The Socratic Method. To quote the University of Chicago Law School website on the topic: Socrates (470-399 BC) was a Greek philosopher who sought to get to the foundations of his students' and colleagues' views by asking continual questions until a contradiction was exposed, thus proving the fallacy of the initial assumption. This became known as the Socratic Method, and may be Socrates' most enduring contribution to philosophy.

In practice, it is not always about finding contradictions, but about exposing assumptions and basically teaching people to literally question everything. Of course, as the old saying goes, you don’t want your mind to be so open your brain falls out, but you should always check your own assumptions. For instance, applied here, we should note that we have no idea when that video was shot. We aren’t even sure where it was shot, or who was participating. We are sharing it because it has recently gotten attention and it speaks for itself. But we admittedly don’t know much beyond that.

The Socratic Method is also a fun way to drive a person crazy on TSMSFKA Twitter (The Social Media Site Formerly Known As Twitter), Socratically interrogating the positions of leftists and showing how incoherent it is. But it’s also probably why this author is on a lot of leftist block lists. As one TSMSFKA Twitter user noted a while back: It’s like when Kirk used logic to destroy the robot’s processor, only it’s happening on an organic, slow motion planet of clowns.

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https://twitchy.com/aaronwalker/2024/02/04/watch-teacher-applies-socratic-techniques-to-the-claim-that-jk-rowling-is-a-bigot-n2392525