During a recent discussion with the Rector em. of Global Humanistic University, Prof. Dr. Helmar Grabner raised an idea that stayed with me: perhaps education needs to take the Socratic Oath much more seriously.
Medicine has long recognized that expertise creates responsibility. A physician possesses knowledge, authority and access that place another human being in a position of trust. The Hippocratic tradition turned that relationship into an explicit ethical commitment.
Education carries a different form of power, but its consequences can last just as long. A teacher can strengthen a person’s confidence or diminish it. A university can expand intellectual freedom or reward conformity. An education system can open opportunity or reproduce exclusion. Today, artificial intelligence adds another layer of influence, because educators increasingly make decisions about technologies that can recommend, assess, translate, profile and shape what students see.
Perhaps the question is no longer whether education has an ethical responsibility. The question is whether we make that responsibility explicit enough.
The Socratic Oath is not a new idea
The idea of a Socratic Oath for educators has a history. German educationalist Hartmut von Hentig formulated a Socratic Oath for the teaching profession in 1991. More recently, Professor Klaus Zierer revisited the concept in The Socratic Oath for Teachers, arguing for a professional commitment centred on the successful education and well-being of students.
The analogy with medicine is useful, although education should develop its own principles rather than imitate medicine literally.
At its core, a Socratic Oath asks educators to articulate something that professional standards documents often express in much more technical language: for whose benefit do I exercise the power entrusted to me?
That is a serious question. Education is built on an asymmetry. Teachers know things learners do not yet know. Institutions decide who enters, who progresses and who receives recognition. Universities establish what qualifies as knowledge. Assessment can influence employment, mobility and life chances.
Such power deserves more than procedural compliance. It deserves an ethical commitment.
Education has always been about more than transferring knowledge
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives education a purpose much larger than instruction. Article 26 states that education should contribute to the full development of the human personality and strengthen respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
That wording matters. A university therefore has responsibilities that extend beyond transferring information efficiently. Education develops judgment, independence, intellectual discipline and an individual’s capacity to participate in society.
The educator’s responsibility follows from that purpose.
To teach is partly to transmit knowledge. It is also to decide how authority is exercised around a learner who is still developing knowledge, confidence and identity.
That requires restraint as much as expertise. An educator should not humiliate a learner in the name of standards. Academic authority should never become an excuse for intellectual coercion. A student’s background, language or social position should not determine how seriously their potential is treated.
These are ethical propositions before they are pedagogical techniques. A Socratic Oath could make them visible.
Why the AI era changes the argument
Artificial intelligence makes this discussion much more urgent.
For generations, the ethical relationship in education was largely between teacher, learner and institution. UNESCO now describes an emerging teacher–AI–student dynamic.
That apparently small change has enormous consequences.
An educator may decide whether AI is used to generate learning material, evaluate student work, recommend resources, translate content or identify patterns in student behaviour. Institutions may increasingly depend on automated systems for decisions that learners cannot easily see or challenge.
Consequently, educational ethics can no longer concern only what the teacher personally says or does.
It must also concern the systems the educator chooses to place between themselves and the learner.
UNESCO’s AI Competency Framework for Teachers reflects precisely this shift. It identifies a human-centred mindset and AI ethics among five core competency dimensions. Human agency, accountability and social responsibility sit alongside technical knowledge and pedagogy.
That is significant.
The most advanced educator of the AI era may not be the person using the greatest number of AI tools.
It may be the person who knows when not to use one.
A Socratic Oath for the AI age
A contemporary Socratic Oath should begin with the dignity of the learner.
It should commit educators to developing rather than diminishing human agency. Demand intellectual honesty, including the willingness to distinguish evidence from opinion and certainty from uncertainty. Require respect for privacy and reject the casual exploitation of student data.
It should also establish a principle that will become increasingly important: technology does not remove human accountability.
If an AI system recommends an educational decision, a human institution remains responsible for that decision; an automated assessment disadvantages a learner unfairly, the existence of an algorithm does not dissolve accountability; technology makes education more efficient while making students less independent, educators should be willing to question whether efficiency has become the wrong objective.
UNESCO’s Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence takes a similar position at the policy level. It emphasizes human oversight and determination, transparency, fairness, literacy and the principle that AI systems should not displace ultimate human responsibility.
Education should translate those principles into professional practice.
What might educators promise?
I would not begin with a long legal document.
The power of an oath lies partly in its clarity.
A modern Socratic commitment might ask educators to promise that they will place the dignity and development of learners at the centre of their professional decisions; pursue truth with intellectual honesty; protect learners from discrimination, manipulation and avoidable harm; respect privacy; preserve the learner’s capacity to question; distinguish education from indoctrination; use technology only when it serves genuine educational purpose; remain accountable for decisions supported by AI; continue learning throughout their professional lives; and accept reasoned criticism of their own practice.
Those commitments sound simple.
Living by them is considerably harder.
That is precisely why an oath can matter.
Professionalism needs knowledge, autonomy and responsibility
An oath should not diminish the professional freedom of teachers.
It should strengthen the case for it.
OECD work on teacher professionalism identifies professional knowledge, autonomy and peer networks as central dimensions of a strong teaching profession. Autonomy matters because good educators constantly make judgments that cannot be prescribed in advance by policy manuals.
However, autonomy and accountability belong together.
The more professional discretion society gives an educator, the stronger the ethical expectation attached to that discretion should become.
This is true in medicine, law, research and engineering.
Education should be no different.
A Socratic Oath would therefore not tell teachers exactly how to teach. It would establish the ethical boundaries within which their professional judgment operates.
That distinction is important.
The oath must not become theatre
There is also a danger.
Institutions are very good at producing declarations.
A university could invite academics to recite an impressive oath while tolerating practices that contradict every sentence of it.
That would make the exercise worse than useless.
For a Socratic Oath to represent a genuine step forward, it should connect to professional formation, institutional governance and everyday decisions.
Teacher education should examine real ethical dilemmas rather than simply distribute a code of conduct. Universities should create mechanisms through which students can question decisions safely. Educators should receive serious preparation in AI ethics, privacy, academic integrity and human rights. Institutions should examine whether their technology procurement aligns with the commitments they publicly make.
Most importantly, educators should periodically revisit the oath.
Ethical responsibility does not end once someone receives a qualification.
From oath to institutional culture
This is where I believe Helmar’s suggestion becomes particularly powerful.
The greatest value of a Socratic Oath may not be the words recited by an individual educator. It may be the conversation an institution must have before it can decide what those words should be.
What does GHU believe a teacher owes a student?
What does ICARUS believe an AI-enabled learning system owes a learner?
Which decisions should technology never make alone?
What does academic freedom require from the educator as well as from the institution?
What does intellectual honesty look like when synthetic content becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from human knowledge?
These are questions that universities will have to answer whether or not they create an oath.
An oath simply prevents us from pretending that the answers are implicit.
Why GHU and ICARUS should explore this together
There is a natural connection between this idea and the partnership between Global Humanistic University and ICARUS.
GHU’s academic environment is grounded in a humanistic conception of education. ICARUS works on AI-enabled infrastructure intended to expand access, multilingual participation and lifelong learning.
The intersection creates a useful test.
Can an institution become more technologically capable while making its human commitments more explicit?
I believe it can.
Indeed, the two developments should happen together.
As educational technology becomes more powerful, universities need stronger—not weaker—statements about the dignity, independence and rights of learners. AI makes knowledge easier to produce, universities need a stronger commitment to intellectual honesty. Automation makes decisions easier to scale, institutions need clearer accountability for those decisions.
And as education becomes more digital, the human relationship at its centre needs deliberate protection.
Beyond compliance
Professional codes already exist in many education systems. Universities have policies on academic integrity, ethics, privacy, discrimination and student welfare.
Why add an oath?
Because policy and commitment perform different functions.
A policy tells us what an institution permits.
An oath asks what kind of professional we intend to become.
That question belongs naturally to education.
Socrates remains relevant precisely because his legacy is associated not with providing easy answers but with questioning assumptions, examining one’s own knowledge and refusing to confuse confidence with truth.
Those habits feel remarkably contemporary in an era of generative AI.
Students will have unprecedented access to answers.
The educational task will increasingly involve teaching them which answers deserve trust, what questions remain unanswered and when they should challenge the system providing the answer.
Educators have to model that behaviour first.
A step ahead for education
So yes, I believe a Socratic Oath can represent a step forward for education.
Not because another declaration will solve the challenges facing schools and universities.
It will not. Its value lies in creating a public professional promise around something education can too easily take for granted: the enormous responsibility involved in shaping another person’s capacity to think.
The next generation of education will have extraordinary technology. It will have more data, more automation, more personalized systems and increasingly capable artificial intelligence.
The question is what ethical architecture will grow alongside them. A Socratic Oath cannot provide that architecture by itself.
But it can establish where the architecture begins: with the dignity of the learner, the integrity of the educator and the principle that knowledge should expand human agency rather than diminish it.
For education in the AI age, that would be a meaningful promise to make.
Sources:
- Klaus Zierer — The Socratic Oath for Teachers, Routledge – https://www.routledge.com/The-Socratic-Oath-for-Teachers/Zierer/p/book/9781032574196 – Documents the history of Hartmut von Hentig’s 1991 Socratic Oath and Zierer’s contemporary formulation centred on successful education and student well-being.
- Socratic Oath of the Academic — ThinQ Education – https://www.thinq.education/post/socratic-oath-of-the-academic – Discusses the relationship between professional ethical oaths in medicine, science, teaching and academic life.
- UNESCO — AI Competency Framework for Teachers– https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/ai-competency-framework-teachers– Defines 15 teacher competencies across human-centred mindset, AI ethics, AI foundations, pedagogy and professional learning, with explicit emphasis on human agency and teacher responsibility.
- UNESCO — Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence – https://www.unesco.org/en/artificial-intelligence/recommendation-ethics – Provides UNESCO’s international ethical framework around human oversight, accountability, transparency, fairness, literacy and human rights in AI.
- OECD — Teacher Professionalism – https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/teacher-professionalism_5jm3xgskpc40-en.html – Frames teacher professionalism around professional knowledge, autonomy and peer networks and reports links with teacher self-efficacy and professional satisfaction.
- United Nations — Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 26– https://www.un.org/en/node/124305 – Establishes education as a human right and states that education should support the full development of the human personality and respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.