“I don’t know.”

David Lenson, director of the comparative literature program at the University of Massachusetts, is willing to bet most undergraduates at his school will go four years without hearing a professor say those three words.

And he blames that, in part, on a pedagogical fallacy born in ancient Greece that he did his best to puncture in a talk Wednesday to a capacity crowd in the Campus Center Auditorium. Ranging from Greek philosophy to modern college teaching, Lenson lampooned faculty who claim to embrace the Socratic method of teasing out knowledge through escalating questions.

Lenson believes that sacred cow of instruction is more of an ass.

(David Lenson, left; Collegian photo)

“The Socratic method is a kind of veiled authoritarianism in the classroom,” said Lenson, who has taught at UMass for 40 years and is known for his acerbic and erudite lectures. “This has infected all of us to some degree.”

“The Socratic method knows the conclusion that it wants to reach … and will slowly, gradually reel you in until you give consent to it,” Lenson said.

Enacting a passage from Plato’s work, Lenson imitated a sheep bleating out agreement to questions posed by Socrates. “He just keeps asking what lawyers would call leading questions,” he said of the philosopher.

In his view, that results in his supposed conversational “antagonists” slowly “taking the opinion that Socrates had all along” without ever challenging flaws in his assertions. And that, Lenson suggested, is no high and righteous road to learning.

Lenson’s talk, called “The Great Lie of Ideals: From Plato to General Education,” kicked off a four-part series in the Commonwealth Honors College Faculty Lecture Series. Among the hundreds of students listening Wednesday night were many who have been struggling their way through “The Republic” as assigned reading for the honors program.

Lenson assured them that Plato, while praised, is not generally understood. He listed many grievances with Plato, but hammered away at problems he has with the vaunted Socratic method, which he suggested has come down through the ages with an undeserved halo around it.

That method, he said, as practiced by its creator, is a demeaning, passive-aggressive approach to instruction that is less a free exchange of information than a slow force-feeding of fixed ideas.

(Socrates, in a bust at the Louvre in Paris.)

At one point, Lenson imitated a professor who insists he doesn’t lecture (Yes, Lenson interjected, “Lecturing blows”). Mimicking this professor’s tone (superior, a little whiny and with the trace of an English accent) Lenson said this teacher prefers to engage, like the great Socrates, in what he hopes are eye-opening exchanges with students.

“This would be a nice idea, if that’s what the Socratic method was,” he said.

As for “ideals” in Plato’s work, Lenson painted the society the Greek thinker favored as far closer to totalitarianism than democracy, noting that it advocated censorship and entrusted its elites, not common people, with political power. Plato’s “Republic,” Lenson argued, resembled the harsh state of Big Brother that George Orwell imagined in his novel “1984.”

“He has left a legacy of totalitarian thought,” Lenson said of Plato, “that we have never lived down completely.”