> The periodic table of the elements has a lovely underlying theory based on the physical properties of electron orbitals. This cannot be elicited from students who don't know it.
Of course you can't give students a periodic table and Socratically enquire how this came to be. What you can do is, through the Socratic method, elicit an understanding of the lovely underlying theory. That's far more valuable than being able to parrot the table from memory without understanding it.
I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to teach from empiric data--experiments seem to me to be a practical implementation of the Socratic method.
Of course you can't give students a periodic table and Socratically enquire how this came to be. What you can do is, through the Socratic method, elicit an understanding of the lovely underlying theory. That's far more valuable than being able to parrot the table from memory without understanding it.
I'm not sure what you mean by not being able to teach from empiric data--experiments seem to me to be a practical implementation of the Socratic method.