Have you ever sat in a class where the teacher was writing on the board; putting up sentences and equations and speaking while he was writing?
I remember many math related classes, especially statistics where the instructor wrote equations on the board and new equations just kept appearing and appearing.
The same things seem to be true in many social science and history classes.
I am now beginning to see that a great deal of my early learning, before the University of Chicago, was Platonic teaching. The teacher assumed, as Plato did, that the knowledge existed in the world and we only needed to be reminded of it.
The lecture format was designed to remind us of what it was we already knew.
I don't think education using the Platonic method worked on me. I read books and the books talked to me in a sequential manner that was usually explaining how ideas and events were connected. They also explained how to understand the subject. When I finally got to the University of Chicago my education began. All classes were discussions and we learned from each other by comparing and contrasting our perceptions of the material under study.
I would like to say, in the simplest possible terms: all evidence suggests that we are not born understanding a pure and perfectly formed world . We are not born with much if any knowledge about the world around us. Even more importantly, the world around us is not structured on the basis of an a priori truth.
Maybe this is why I never became a teacher and even more importantly why I can't give the same lecture over and over again. I prefer to interact with my audiences on a continual basis and that is NOT what a great speaker does. Great speakers refine a single speech until it is perfect and then give it over and over again.
I have been left to my blog and my books as the media to convey my experiences and understanding.