Dr. Grauer's Column - Socrates Riding Shotgun

Socrates Riding Shotgun
(Athens, September 2026)
By Stuart Grauer

Muse, tell us about a simple man who wandered but was never lost.

He left no writings, created no school and claimed no special wisdom. He appeared in the stories of others much like the Greek gods had appeared, fearing no retribution for anything he challenged—suddenly, in the marketplace or along the road, asking inconvenient questions, relentlessly. Then disappearing.

Not a saint. Something earthier: barefoot, stubborn, funny, homely. Living the polytheistic life among the muses and oracles.

Socrates.

The opening of The Odyssey asks, variously translated: Muse, tell us of a man who wandered and was lost. Socrates hardly went anywhere. His wandering and heroics were of another kind.

I reached Athens after sailing the Ionian Sea off the coast of Greece, and at once began looking for the places where he taught. I knew it was a bit absurd because Socrates had no classroom. He taught wherever he found people: in workshops and gymnasiums, on street corners and beneath the colonnades of the Agora.

Agora. Gathering place. It was the social heart of Athens, a mall and civic center in one—not a formal marble plaza, but a broad, dusty open space beneath the magnificent Acropolis and its Parthenon. The Panathenaic Way crossed it diagonally, and I walked it in my imagination and for real, simultaneously, slowly. Long, shaded colonnades of temples, government buildings, workshops and merchants’ stalls border it. I conjure the smells of leather, olive oil, dust and cooking fires as my imagination shifts to overdrive; the sounds of craftsmen hammering, merchants bargaining, jurors arguing and politicians trying to be heard. Then Socrates was approaching citizens who had come to conduct business and drawing them into conversations they had not expected to have. Later, some youths just learning about new ways of thinking.

Education had not yet been removed from daily life and placed inside a separate institution.

Today, those columns end abruptly and jagged, and building foundations trace the outlines of rooms that no longer exist. But wandering through them was something I had dreamed of for years. It felt less like visiting a ruin than walking through a park inhabited by spirits.

Near the Agora’s edge, I wandered over to what archaeologists identify as the workshop of Simon the shoemaker. Shoemaking materials were found there, along with a small cup bearing Simon’s name. The ancient tradition holds that Socrates frequented Simon’s shop and taught there.

Leather scraps on the floor. Tools on a bench and sandals waiting to be repaired. Out front, Socrates holding court and questioning someone who had made the mistake of claiming to understand justice or courage or logic. Does the word “hypocrisy” sound Greek? He could smell it.

Simon dropped his work when the conversations grew deep or heated, and joined in. He may or may not have preserved the conversations we know today, but one way or another Plato and Xenophon got ahold of them, and each created his own portrait of the man. So we can’t know exactly what Socrates said beside the shoemaker’s bench, but thanks largely to Plato we can recognize the education that was going on there.

It was local. Conversational. Inseparable from the life of the community. The community had a direct democracy—male citizens could vote directly on every issue—so we can imagine some deep discourse and polemics.

Legendarily, Socrates did not deliver information. It seems he created… perplexity. Socrates was the master at exposing the distance between what people said they believed and what their lives revealed. I walk and imagine his teaching beginning just at the point where anyone thought they were certain. About anything. Imagining a place where everyone could freely speak their mind seems a luxury… we do not seem to have this in my real world, at present. We speak in riddles, leery of the deep probes that will reveal too much. We might fear Socrates today, as many came to in his time. Socrates didn't merely ask difficult questions. He publicly exposed the ignorance of people who believed themselves wise. He questioned politicians, poets, craftsmen, conventional religion, and received wisdom. The young Athenians watched and sometimes imitated him.

Now I walk from Simon’s shop toward the back end of the Agora and find the remains of a building believed by many archaeologists to have been the Athenian state prison. It seems to have been where Socrates spent his final days and drank the hemlock. The formal charges in 399 BCE were impiety—failing to recognize the city's gods and introducing new divine things. And also corrupting the young. But the politics of the day made those charges more flammable than that.

Nothing dramatic to see here: low foundations shaping a rectangular building the size of a large classroom or two. Scattered stones. And imaginably the end of history’s greatest teaching life.

There is no one around. I sit for an hour thinking on and off about a current reluctance to call anyone a teacher. More of these conversations than I’m comfortable with. We now have coaches, guides, mentors, facilitators and learning designers. Each nouveau moniker describes something worthy, but also a place where our profession is surrendering its real self. Maybe teacher now sounds too traditional, too ruined, too humble, or too branded.

But as we abandon the word, we abandon a noble tradition… making a straw man of Socrates.

Is a teacher really the passive distributor of lessons created somewhere else? A status quo bureaucrat? What of the one who notices whose eyes are present, what question has emerged, what the weather makes possible, and what the place itself is trying to teach. A teacher studies the subject knowledge, sure, just as Socrates surely studied Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (as recorded by Plato, who taught them to Alexander the Great, who carried them into battle). But beyond the prep, what the “real” teacher studies, probes, and divines is this: the learners.

No guide could have predicted what Socrates would discuss beside Simon’s sandal shop that morning even though my muse was telling me all of the above. No standard curriculum could have anticipated which young Athenian would appear or what boast he would bring only to have Socrates lace straight away into it.

In the prison, I sit on a foundation stone I’m not sure you are allowed to sit on, where I imagine he sat, but no one is around, and I think of the thousands of people now establishing small pods and microschools and other small learning communities in basements, forests, living rooms, churches, and rental properties. Small schools. When they are led in the way of Socrates, small schools return judgment and trust to teachers and their students. These teachers respond to weather, opportunity, curiosity and place. Little agoras: gathering places where real people gather and pursue consequential questions, whatever they are.

It is hot and everything is still. A tortoise makes his way along the front.

And the pain remains here in prison. Today, back home, questioning is becoming dangerous again. Teachers and librarians remove books or avoid difficult subjects—not always because a law requires it, but because a single complaint may threaten their schools. Scientists revise grant proposals, deleting politically disfavored words and abandoning questions that might make their research unfundable. University presidents, knowing that billions of dollars in federal research support can be frozen or withdrawn, calculate which principles they can afford to defend publicly—they hold their tongues.

Today the cost of asking the deepest questions we can ask is becoming visible, and consequential elections approach back home. The tradition of Socrates matters and is still fraught. To be a teacher can’t merely mean the safe transmission of the approved knowledge—or compliance for fear of risks to your grants or tenure. Maybe “guides” or “learning designers” do that. But teachers follow the question, wherever it may lead, even when powerful people would prefer that it disappear.

In the prison, I think about artificial intelligence, too. How I can drive along in my car and ask it question after question as the road spools out along with my curiosity. How I can challenge answers, or dig deeper and deeper, and deeper; or flip the learning and command it to question me deeper. AI becomes a tireless conversational partner, Socrates riding shotgun.

Of course, only an imitation. AI can produce a probing question but not stand barefoot in the civic square. It shares no weather, risks no reputation, notices no silence between two people–and it is censored. It accepts no moral responsibility for the lives it shapes through the inquiry; hence it drinks no hemlock—a massive debate shaping up right now involving the world’s tech leaders and governments.

The Agora is mostly ruins. But its educational idea is not. Wherever a teacher goes off script, wherever a small school becomes a genuine gathering place that re-births the meaning of teacher, and wherever the question is valued more than the answer.

Socrates wandered the Agora, but he was never lost. Twenty-five centuries later, many among us are trying to find our way back there.

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