A Method of Education

February 23rd, 2026

There is a method of education that seems like it might work very well. It’s similar to classical education, but it’s not quite it. I’ve only seen it in books (fiction and non-fiction), which I’ll be pulling ideas from. The method includes lots of questions, lots of verbal learning, and lots of defenses. Some ideas are present in a PhD defense, but it’s much more than that.

I first saw this method in Jack by George Sayer which describes the life of C.S. Lewis. In the book, he talks about Lewis’s tutoring before he went into university. He had a tutor who had him study during the day and then in the evenings, he had to answer questions about what he was learning and defend his responses. This worked really well for him, and he credited it with building his critical thinking and argument/logical skills (which were used in Mere Christianity). It seems like a fairly classical way to learn (he learned many languages during that time), but I don’t think it’s restricted in any way to learning the classics.

The second place I saw this method (and the reason I thought of writing this), is the book, The Will of The Many by James Islington. I will try to avoid spoilers, but one of the many settings of the book is The Academy, which is the highest institute of learning in their world. At The Academy, the students learn mostly by conversation, reading, and doing. The teachers quiz their students constantly during class, asking hard questions, and a large part of studying is the students talking about the topics.

As they got to higher levels, there is even more discussion and debate. They often have to defend specific positions to each other and their critiqued on their arguments and understanding. The expectations are high, but they learn a lot, and it seems reasonable to me. I wonder what it would look like if our colleges were like that. You wouldn’t be able to not learn since it would be obvious.

As for what this would look like practically, an example could be a classroom of 10-20 people, and the teacher is an expert on the subject. During the week, the students would be assigned part of a book to read or some problems to work on/study. When they come to class, the teacher will teach a new subject and then do intense review of the previous week, asking difficult questions (where answering can improve your grade or something like that), and then challenges their students responses. This encourages the students to actually think, not only memorize. Lastly, as students gain a better understanding of the subject, the teacher should pair them off to ask and answer hard questions, the goal is to challenge each other.

My siblings and I have a small part of this some evenings at our house. We often talk about practical topics (such as what should our church do about something, or here’s an issue we see in the culture) and some of the discussion is definitely asking hard questions and forcing others to defend their views. It strengths our understanding of the world, and I think we all have gotten pretty good at articulating a position well and giving reasons for it.

I don’t know if this is the best way of education, but it seems likely to work better than most things we have (especially for deeper understandings of subjects). Being able to explain a subject is the truest sign of a real understanding and our current system doesn’t really measure that.