In June, a British teacher reprimanded two 13-year-old students, labeling the teenagers “despicable.” Their offense? Asking a simple question.
Following an eighth-grade “life education” class about “identity,” one of the students asked a classmate: “How can you identify as a cat when you’re a girl?” The two students disagreed with the lesson, asserting: “If you have a vagina, you’re a girl and if you have a penis, you’re a boy.” The teacher told the inquiring students they would no longer be welcome at school if they continued to express their opinion.
If only such stories were anomalies. Yet, as Americans know all too well, there is now often a steep price to pay for questioning the zeitgeist when it comes to sexual or racial ideology. Conservative thinkers are maligned and assaulted. In the social sciences and humanities in the United States and United Kingdom, 75 percent of conservative academics say their departments are a hostile environment for their beliefs. Conservative students regularly self-censor, as do federal employees.
As painful as this is, those teenage British girls are onto something. Indeed, they employed a rhetorical strategy as ancient as the very beginnings of our philosophical tradition — that of the great Greek philosopher Socrates, who unveiled the foolishness of his interlocutors not by shouting insults or fist-pounding but by asking honest and penetrating questions. Conservatives cornered in spaces of conformist ideology, be it schools or workplaces, would do well to master this powerful rhetorical weapon.
Socrates Started the Questions
“Is it
