Socratic dialogue with kids - by Henrik Karlsson

I saw a YouTube video recently where Michael Strong talks to a ten-year-old, Alana, about opportunity cost. I don’t know anyone as good at talking about complex ideas with children as Michael, so I asked him how he does it. Michael started his career in the 1980s working for Mortimer Adler, most famous as the author of “How to Read a Book.” Adler did something called the Paidea Project, where they tried to revive the Ancient Greek idea of education as enculturation (παιδεία, or paidea). Michael was hired to arrange Socratic seminars in public schools. He has spent the last forty years going deeper on that thread, developing Socratic practice and starting a series of schools that aim to be subcultures that support individual flourishing. In the video with Alana—one of hundreds of conversations that Michael has recorded with her since she was four years old—Michael asks her to read a definition from an economics paper about opportunity cost: When economists refer to the opportunity cost

I saw a YouTube video recently where Michael Strong talks to a ten-year-old, Alana, about opportunity cost. I don’t know anyone as good at talking about complex ideas with children as Michael, so I asked him how he does it. Michael started his career in the 1980s working for Mortimer Adler, most famous as the author of “How to Read a Book.” Adler did something called the Paidea Project, where they tried to revive the Ancient Greek idea of education as enculturation (παιδεία, or paidea). Michael was hired to arrange Socratic seminars in public schools. He has spent the last forty years going de