The Seminar and the Recovery of Civil Discourse 

In recent years, seminar-based education has enjoyed a modest but real recovery. Classical schools have multiplied. Great Books programs, both in secondary schools and in colleges, continue to attract families and students who want something different from the dominant forms of contemporary education. The Great Hearts network of classical charter schools presents the Socratic method as its primary tool of instruction. The Chesterton Schools Network describes the Socratic seminar as central to its model. St. John’s College still organizes its curriculum around sustained seminar discussion of the great books. Biola’s Torrey Honors College likewise offers a Great Books program built around classical learning and discussion. At my own institution, the University of St. Thomas in Houston, the honors program invites students into the “great conversation” through careful reading and meaningful face-to-face dialogue through Socratic seminars.  

There are many reasons for this growing interest in the seminar format, but I want to focus on its potential for contributing to the public good and civic order: the seminar is ordered toward the formation of judgment through disciplined focus on interpretation of a common text and truth-seeking through dialectical sifting. The seminar trains students how to ask questions of a text and of a colleague. It teaches them when to speak, how to listen carefully. It shows them that losing an argument is not the end of the world, and that the winner of an argument still has to consider the good of the interlocutor. 

The Cure We Need 

We speak often now of polarization and incivility. Instead of reasoned argument, what we get is denunciation, trolling, virtue signaling, cancellation, tribalized guilt-by-association, and emotional outbursts. We get trigger warnings, words as violence, speech codes, self-censoring, and, in the extreme, assassination of public figures, like Charlie Kirk, known for fearless speech and debate. 

That loss has political consequences, because free institutions depend on more than procedures and laws. They depend on persons capable of deliberation together. Politics involves putting speeches in common. A republic requires citizens who can contend over common things without treating every disagreement as an existential threat or a mere occasion for self-display or tribal signaling. Civil disagreement, in that sense, is a moral and civic art, an art that needs to be cultivated and that depends on prior virtues. 

A seminar gathers students around something outside themselves, usually a text, question, or problem, and binds them to a common object of attention that, because of its nobility, beauty, goodness, or truth, deserves their attention. The seminar relativizes the self with respect to the text and the other seminar participants by insisting that speech answer to reality and that each participant transcend his own opinions, concerns, or interests through inquiry and speech. One must read carefully, listen closely, remember what has been said, and respond not to an imagined opponent but to the arguments and persons he actually faces.  

This already places the seminar at odds with some of the most powerful habits of our age. Social media reward speed, overstatement, and appearance. Bureaucratic culture, shaped by Human Resources, often prefers managed consensus. Much of our public life encourages either impulsive declaration or anxious silence. The seminar, by contrast, requires patience, recollection, and measured, genuinely interpersonal speech. It slows speech down enough to allow for sustained thoughts and cultivates meaningful exchanges. In the context of schools and, especially at colleges with Great Books programs, these seminar exchanges usually rely on communities of intellectual friends. 

Cultivating Virtue 

Central to successful seminar participation are the dual virtues of moderation and courage. These are not usually paired in our educational rhetoric, but they should belong together. Contrary to popular belief, moderation in speech is not timidity. It requires a restraint on the spiritedness that insists on my own way or my own opinion. The moderate speaker doesn’t interrupt because he cannot bear not to be heard, or because he cannot bear what is not his own to be given time for consideration. He doesn’t exaggerate because he cannot distinguish degrees. He does not collapse a disagreement into a moral showdown before the matter has even been clarified. He listens. He waits. He distinguishes. He answers the best version of another’s claim rather than the weakest. He recognizes that not every ambiguity must be instantly resolved, and not every objection must be met with force. He recognizes that, even if error might have no rights, persons in error do; and he, himself, is often the one who errs. 

Courage in speech is the matching virtue. Courage is not aggression; it involves the willingness to hazard a judgment when judgment is required. The student in a seminar must eventually speak. He must propose an interpretation, raise an objection, defend a claim, or dissent from an emerging consensus. He must do so knowing that his view may be shown wanting, even by his peers. He may be corrected. He may discover that he has missed something obvious. In that respect the seminar places the soul under a salutary pressure: it teaches students to risk embarrassment for the sake of truth, and gradually teaches that venturing a mistaken opinion publicly is the price for intellectual advancement—not only for me, but for everyone else involved in the conversation. It is the opposite of and remedy for cancel culture. 

These two virtues complement one another. Moderation without courage becomes evasive or withdrawn. Sometimes the truth needs us to speak up. But spiritedness without moderation becomes rash and domineering. It destroys the foundation of an intellectual life lived in common just as much as the choice to withdraw from speech through timidity. The seminar, at its best, trains students to walk the difficult tension between them. It teaches them measured candor. 

That formation is something that does not happen by accident: it depends in large part on the one who leads the seminar. If you have had a bad seminar experience, it may be due to lack of leadership, frequently involving a tendency to treat the seminar as though it were self-executing: arrange the chairs in a circle, assign a hard book, and the democratic magic will take care of itself. But a seminar does not form students automatically. It can easily decay into a few predictable pathologies. It can become a pleasant exchange of impressions in which nothing is really at stake. It can become a contest in verbal display, where the quickest or boldest voices dominate. It can become an occasion for ideological signaling, with everyone speaking less to the matter at hand than to the moral prestige of his own position. 

Leadership and Judgment Formation in the Age of AI  

The seminar leader’s task is to prevent these degradations. He does so by close attention to the conversation and to the character of the seminar participants, weighing always—usually through sustained personal experience with the students—what each one needs. Is one student timid? You may need to cold-call him to force him to speak. Is one student too brash? You may need to take him aside and counsel him more. Is one student inattentive? Challenge him to summarize the discussion at the session’s end. The seminar leader teaches moderation by slowing the rush to declaration, by pointing students back to the text, by insisting on fair objections, and by refusing to let the discussion be captured by vainglory or aggression. He teaches courage by making the room demanding but habitable. Students must know that they can venture an interpretation, or dissent from a consensus, without being humiliated for doing so. They should be recognized for special insights or for demonstrating growth. 

That work of cultivating the virtues of speech has become all the more important in the age of artificial intelligence. The central problem AI poses is not just factual inaccuracy or the opportunity to cheat; the deeper problem is the temptation to abdicate judgment. Large language models can simulate intelligence in impressive ways. They can retrieve, summarize, imitate, and recombine. But what they cannot do is judge. They do not know what matters, what is proportionate, what is fitting, what is true in the full human sense. They produce patterns, not prudence. They can assist judgment, but they can never replace it.  

That is why the seminar is urgent now in a way it was not even a decade ago. If AI increasingly handles the functions of retrieval, summary, and stylistic imitation, then the distinctively human burden of education comes more clearly into view. We must form persons capable of judgment. And judgment is not the same as information processing. It requires attention to the matter at hand, memory of what has gone before, sensitivity to proportion, and the practical wisdom to see which considerations bear most heavily on the here and now. It requires weighing and sifting evidence to distinguish the true from the false and the significant from the trivial. The seminar is not the whole of that formation, but it is one of its nurseries and laboratories. Around the seminar table, students learn to test claims, weigh rival interpretations, and discover that truth is often reached through disciplined contestation rather than by immediate intuition or mechanical output. 

This point bears directly on civic life. A citizenry unable to judge will either defer to technocratic management or fall back into empty passion and sloganeering. The habits formed in a seminar are therefore not merely academic habits; they are a training ground for the responsible exercise of freedom. They teach students that disagreement need not dissolve community, and that conviction need not become fanaticism. They learn that to share a world with others is to endure the friction of rival judgments without ceasing to treat one another as partners in inquiry, especially in a republic that requires public deliberation about speeches and deeds. 

This is one reason the revival of classical schools and Great Books programs deserves more attention—and support—than it usually receives. Their importance does not consist only in the recovery of older texts, as important as that is. It lies also in the recovery of forms of speech and attention that our culture has neglected. If these institutions sometimes seem old-fashioned, that may only be because they are preserving arts that modern conditions have made difficult. The seminar is one of those arts. 

The seminar cannot, by itself, heal our public life. No educational form can bear that burden alone. But if we want a society capable of civil disagreement, we will need to create and sustain places where we can safely learn it. We will need teachers who can form students in both restraint and boldness. We will need classrooms in which citizens are taught to speak neither recklessly nor fearfully, but well, aware of their duties to their fellows to listen, consider, and engage as free and equal citizens. 

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