Socratic Study

@usedgov x.com/socraticstudy/…

Attention parents and teachers of high schoolers! Encourage your students to enter the Presidential 1776 Award civics competition, testing students in grades 9-12 on our nation's founding history: presidential1776award.org #America250

@TheGreatB00ks I recently listened to the episode on Book I. I enjoyed the conversation, and it was a great complement to my reading.

@socraticstudy Hey good work! Hope our videos and podcasts can be of some help. It is an excellent text.

Friends, what are you reading this weekend? Stay warm!☕️📚❄️

Agency is becoming a hot theme. More in tech circles than education, but it's seeping down. On Twitter and LinkedIn, I'm seeing various people—often tech or tech-adjacent—talking about agency. Sometimes they connect it to education and get excited. This theme has been central to alternative education for decades. Now it's becoming mainstream. The language is finally catching up to what schools like The Socratic Experience have always understood: children thrive when they have ownership over their learning and their lives.

That's fair, and yeah, kids will find workarounds for anything, they are smart! But most ed-tech is just digitized worksheets. Read this, click that, watch a video. Passive stuff you can skim while half paying attention. What I'm building aims to be different: an AI tutor that uses the Socratic method. It only asks questions, never gives answers. You can't cheat by asking for the answer because it won't give you one. The only way through is to actually think. So when the class discusses something together later, everyone actually has something to say. They already did the thinking. And the teacher doesn't have to run around helping 30 kids individually. More peer interaction, not less. That's the goal anyway.

@socraticstudy @karenvaites @synthesischool What I see in the classroom is that kids are glad to get on tech but woefully off task even with “go guardian”. They are super smart and know how to work around things. We also see less self regulation and less ability to interact with and work with peers.

‘Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it. A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only marginal gains on standardised tests. The majority had little effect, no effect or harmful ones. Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called “The Digital Delusion”, has reviewed meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of studies. His verdict: “In nearly every context, ed tech doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.”’

@megha_lilly These books are much better when discussed with others! My first reading of Homer was with a book club and I would've likely given up if I was reading solo.

Here is the link to the recording for our first ever Book Club session about the Odyssey, Book I! We talked a lot today about the blame game between the gods and man and how to get into the mind of the ancients. classicalideals.press/p/book-club-ja…

@megha_lilly Well said.

“How can you lecture about the odyssey, you’re not an expert” yes, I know I’m not an expert. This is not a lecture. This is a book club, a discussion for FUN. FYI, academics don’t own literature and anyone can enjoy it.

@Remotion Nice, made one! Thanks :) x.com/socraticstudy/…

Remotion now has Agent Skills - make videos just with Claude Code! $ npx skills add remotion-dev/skills This animation was created just by prompting 👇

BYOT! socraticstudy.ai/iliad is live. It's a Socratic companion for the Iliad, not SparkNotes, not a summary, just a conversation to make you actually think about what's happening. Free while I figure out if this is useful to anyone besides me.

Agreed. Enhance your reading of the Illiad with a Socratic guide that has endless patience, link in bio :)

@TheGreatB00ks “Our survival depends on our ability to read the maps left by those who saw the lights flicker and eventually darken.” So true. Great share!

Very much worth the read! ⬇️🥇

@TheGreatB00ks If you’re not embarrassed by your first reading’s “notes”… you waited too long! My first read of the Iliad has notes that 5-years-older me looks at like, “aw bless your heart” 😅 Keeps me humble and reminds me how much the text keeps teaching across rereads.

Write in your books. You read a text to reread it. Notes, marks, etc., are all guideposts to help you have a deeper read the next time.

Love another version of AI that forces you to think. Building something similar myself :)

“You should read before bed to help you get sleepy.” is the biggest lie I’ve ever been told. I’ll be up until 3am, fully invested.

Dear Ed Week, This is 100% wrong, “leave the canon to English majors” is exactly how we lose civilization. Classical literature is not just harder content. It is liberation. It rips students out of the tiny prison of their own age, their own trends, their own slogans, their own shallow assumptions about what matters. It reminds them the world did not begin with them, and that their feelings are not the measure of truth. Shakespeare doesn’t teach “skills.” He reveals ambition, lust, betrayal, guilt, and the cost of sin. Homer teaches courage and honor. Augustine exposes the restless heart. Dante shows that loves can be ordered rightly or twisted into ruin. These books give students a map of the soul. The real enemy isn’t Crime and Punishment. The real enemy is a culture training kids to be bored by silence and incapable of deep thought. So no, don’t abandon the canon because it’s hard. It is their way out of the matrix.