For Love Of Wisdom, In Peshawar

Written By Nadeem Khan

The ancient Greek philosopher, Socrates, would wander the agora- a public space for debate and discussion in the heart of Athens- seeking fellows for the intellectual discourses he used to conduct. One day, he came across a young man, called Euthydemus, who boasted of his knowledge of various subjects. The old Socrates, with his signature humility, didn’t challenge Euthydemus’ claims outright, instead, Socrates asked him a series of questions, unravelling his fragmented and disjointed information layer by layer, until the young man saw his inner ignorance. By the end of the discussion, the young man, Euthydemus, was not only cognizant of his limited knowledge but was also impressed by Socrates' method of thinking about one's form and function of thinking. “I cannot teach anybody anything,”the teacher of Plato and Xenophon is reported to have said, “I can only make them think”. The element which is missing the most from our education system today is the one that Socrates practised in the 5th century BCE. Instead of equipping our future generation with the lifelong skills of thinking critically and creatively, we are stuffing their heads with lots of information- information often so messy and muddled that they cannot make any sense of.

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