Where “I don’t know” begins

The boy in the Meno

Throughout my years of teaching, at every level of education I have worked intensively with the Socratic method. What interests me most is what happens before students reach an answer, when someone hesitates and finds words for an idea they had not been able to express before.

It is one reason I keep returning to Plato’s Meno. Socrates calls over a young, enslaved boy from Meno’s household who has never studied geometry. He draws a square and asks him how long the side of a square twice its area would be. The boy answers confidently and is wrong. He tries again and is wrong again. Then he says he does not know.

Socrates tells Meno that the boy is now in a better position than before. A moment earlier, he was wrong without knowing that he was wrong. Now he can see the limits of what he knows, and because he can see them, he can begin to look. Through further questioning, the boy eventually reaches the answer. Socrates claims that he has taught him nothing.

Learning as remembering

The knowledge, he says, was already there, and the questioning helped the boy bring it back into awareness. Plato calls this ανάμνησις. In modern Greek, my first language, ανάμνηση is such an ordinary word: a memory, something remembered. I still find it surprising that learning can be described as remembering.

Socrates shows the power of questioning, although some of his questions guide the boy towards an answer he already has in mind. As a teacher, I recognise that temptation immediately. When a student is close to an idea, it takes discipline not to give them the answer. In coaching, I have to resist that temptation even more carefully. My role is to leave space for the other person to reach their own understanding and not to find the answer for them. The boy also had no say in being questioned in front of his master, whereas a client chooses to come and can leave any question unanswered.

Not every “I don’t know” begins in the same place

People sometimes ask me how coaching differs from therapy. I find it easiest to answer through the boy’s “I don’t know”. In therapy, those words may open a different kind of exploration. In coaching, I often hear them as the point where looking can begin: what does the person already know, or sense without yet having words for it?Therapy works clinically with trauma, psychological distress and long-standing patterns. If what you are carrying is affecting your health or your ability to get through the day, a therapist is the right first conversation, and if I sense that someone needs that kind of support, I tell them. I am not there to diagnose or prescribe. I believe people carry their own wisdom, even when they cannot yet reach it clearly. The work is to help them notice what is getting in the way and hear themselves more fully, so that their choices come from that awareness.

This brings me back to the boy in the Meno. I would not make Plato’s claim that all knowledge is literally waiting inside us to be recollected. But I recognise something in that image. In a good coaching conversation, a person sometimes says something aloud and finds it strangely familiar, as if they had known it for a while. That is part of why “I don’t know” interests me so much. Sometimes it comes just before a person hears their own answer and experiences something of ανάμνηση: remembering something about themselves they had lost sight of.