ABSTRACT
Because we live in a society where intellect and imagination are pitifully neglected, because we live in an age where the life ofconcepts and metaphors, the essential material ofintellectual culture, go uncherished, what I am going to describe in this chapter may seem strange, even to some teachers and academics. Yet I regard the approach I will describe in this chapter as the modus vivendi of all true researchers, the Socratic activity without which there can be little reflective culture and no true university, college or school. Dorothy Sayers once remarked: 'Most Englishmen would rather die than think and many do'. One of the functions of the university is to stop that happening and one of its main weapons in the battle against mindless complacency is dialectical research and continuous reflection. Each piece of humanist research, however modest, should be out to test current assumptions, to extend understanding, to provoke contemplation, enquiry, further dissent. In a sense, as in the Socratic dialogue described in the last chapter, the
The
process ofengaged consciousness matters more than the results reached. It is this process that I will describe here in relationship to doing research and, beyond that, to the continuous act of creative learning. I want to enumerate some of the Socratic methods for developing and refining the habit ofcritical reflection. I want to describe the techniques for grasping emergent ideas and securing their progressive amplification into patterns of coherence. My direct concern here is with the university but the implications for both primary and secondary education should be obvious; the reader who is more interested in the broad argument of the book or in the aesthetic is invited to move directly on to Chapter 3.
