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Socratic Pedagogy, Critical Thinking, Moral Reasoning And Inmate Education: An Exploratory Study, Peter Boghossian

Dissertations and Theses

This exploratory study examines the hypothesis that Socratic pedagogy is a useful tool for imparting critical thinking and moral reasoning skills to inmates. The study explores the effectiveness of a new curriculum, Introducing Socrates, which relies on Socratic pedagogy to achieve its objectives. The curriculum draws from the effective criminal justice research on cognitive education to determine its objectives, and then looks to the Platonic dialogues to find broad philosophical questions that tie into those objectives. The program also evaluates salient criticisms of Socratic pedagogy that are found in the educational and philosophical literature, and then isolates and evaluates constructs …