“I cannot teach anybody anything I can only make them think,” a quote I find particularly interesting for two reasons. One, I think this quote applies to many aspects of life. It is true that to an extent you can only instill ideas upon people and watch them expand these ideas to flourish. Two, although many sources state that this quote comes from Socrates, there is no real proof behind that and as far as I know some random guy could have come up with it, but nonetheless, I like it. The reason this quote resonates in my mind is actually quite silly, but looking into it I think that it serves purpose to give a tangible example of how this quote really works.

I used to sit in the third row in either the second or third seat from the left-hand side in my Introduction to Philosophy class, a class that I would soon come to both loathe and regret at the same time and because of my immense dislike for this class half of the subject material slipped into my brain, onto my paper, then stayed there never to make its way back into my brain. However about halfway through the semester the girl who sat next to me disappeared and in her place arrived a tall somewhat lanky boy who had a minimalistic tattoo of a triangle on his forearm.

I only noticed these details because they served as a distraction from Euthyphro’s definitions of “piety”, and really it was either that or falling asleep. Besides his tattoo, this boy who I did not speak to even once and hence do not know his name, was one of the main reasons I understood the quote provided at the top of this article.

As my professor droned on and on monotonously about piety, Euthyphro, and Socrates this boy was on his phone searching up pictures of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. He would hide his phone on his lap and begin to sketch these old philosophers, paying close attention to detail, but here is what really interested me. His sketches often spanned a week or two because they were in incredible effort and class was only an hour and a half long-I suppose he also needed something to stop him from falling asleep-and towards the end of his sketching he would add a big, round nose and an afro to his sketches. It took me a minute to realize he had turned these philosophers into clowns, and I thought it was absolutely amazing. Here was a guy using his creativity, and talents to take an aspect of the subject we wear “learning”, and transform it into something of his own.

When I stumbled upon that quote initially I thought that it was such a coincidence that I had an experience that I could relate back to, and after finding out that perhaps Socrates never said this quote I was a bit hesitant to write this article, but Socrates or not somebody wrote the quote down, and as far as quotes go this one made a great deal of sense to me. Just like the quote says you can make a person think, just like my buddy was doing in philosophy, but you cannot teach a person that does not want to be taught. I will never know why that guy kept drawing the philosophers as clowns-perhaps he secretly wanted to join the circus-, or if he ever really retained any information that was taught to us, but I do want to thank him for providing me with the opportunity to think about a topic.