What it is
A tutor that will not hand over the answer
Socraites takes a body of stories or source texts and turns it into a complete classroom: a paced reader with a storyteller's voice, a coach that questions rather than lectures, discussion boards the whole class argues in, and a teacher who sees and approves everything before a student receives it.
The distinguishing property is not the prompt. Most tutoring products ask a model to behave Socratically and hope it complies. Socraites places a transformer between the model and the learner that classifies output as question-shaped or answer-shaped, and structurally reshapes answer-shaped output into question form before the student ever sees it. A student who tries to talk their way to the answer is not refused — they are asked something else.
One exception is carved deliberately. A child who asks what a word means gets a definition, because withholding vocabulary is not Socratic, it is just an obstacle. The carve is conjunctive — a definition marker, an actual question, and a hard length bound, all three together — so an answer cannot be smuggled out behind definition language.
Reading is the medium. Understanding is the product. The system is built so that the shortcut does not exist.
Architecture
One engine, configured — never forked
Every pack, partner edition and subject runs through identical code. A pack is content and configuration; it is never runtime, memory, orchestration, policy or safety. A pack containing engine code is rejected by definition, and the second pack shipped with a zero-line engine difference to prove the seam is real.
Safety
The model proposes; the gateway decides
Nothing a model generates reaches a student directly. Every student-facing output passes a chokepoint that resolves an approved source envelope, generates under confinement, then filters, classifies, verifies and grounds the candidate before release. Failure at any stage fails closed — the student gets silence or an approved fallback, never a guess.
A second reviewer sits inside that chokepoint on every exchange, in every safety mode. She detects fabrication and is never herself a source of truth: the record she writes into structurally cannot carry a correction, so she can flag but cannot invent. On a flag, the original confined generator regenerates without the unsupported claim, bounded at two attempts, then re-verifies. Because the output is a question rather than an assertion, dropping an unsupported claim usually still leaves a good question.
Content
Packs are the asset
A pack is a body of work turned into a teachable object: the text, its scene-by-scene structure, adapted tellings, narration timed to the sentence, artwork, question batteries built on the decision-moment rather than plot recall, and the teacher guide. Six exist today, and they appreciate independently of the software.
Adaptation is not levelling. The simpler telling of a story carries the same unresolved moral tension as the original, and no reading-level label appears anywhere a student can see it.
Scope
The twenty-seven capabilities
The ratified build scope. It is fixed rather than aspirational — sequence may stage and release gates may hold exposure, but the scope itself is not optional.
Status is reported strictly, because the words are not interchangeable. Code that is merged and deployed is not the same as code a live classroom has used, and this document never conflates them. Nothing below has been validated against live institutional usage, because no institutional deployment has happened yet.
Teaching How a teacher instructs the system
- 01Teacher-authored lesson instructionThree pedagogical questions — what students should understand, what stays deliberately open, which misconception to watch for — then a plain-language preview of how Socraites will behave.Held
- 22Coaching on how to instruct SocraitesWorked examples in teacher language while they write, and a flag when two instructions contradict each other. It never silently rewrites what a teacher wrote.Held
- 02Teacher style profilesA durable record of a teacher's own instructional patterns, owned by them — visible, editable, deletable, and structurally invisible to administrators.Held
- 03Learning from confirmed preferencesRepeated behaviour becomes a proposed preference the teacher must confirm. Nothing takes effect unconfirmed.Held
Reading How the text reaches a student
- 05Story ModeOne sentence or thought per screen, tap to advance, position preserved across sessions.Live
- 06Whole-story, paragraph and sentence narrationTap the single sentence you are stuck on, or have the whole story read aloud with the current sentence highlighted.Live
- 07Deliberately paced narrationThe pause between sentences is the comprehension time. Three pacing profiles, with per-sentence pause and emphasis authored into the content itself.Live
- 04Adapted presentation modesA simpler telling that still carries the same unresolved moral tension. No reading-level label is ever shown to a student.Held
- 20Public-domain packs and versioned adaptationsSix live today: character, Founding Documents, philosophy, Civil War, the Divine Comedy, and a gated medical-ethics pack.Live
- 21Artwork tied to story scenesScene-level artwork with alt text. The structure is built and three packs are illustrated; artwork for the remaining packs is not yet funded.Partial
Discussion How a class argues together
- 09Discussion boards with full-thread analysisStudents post in text or voice, and the system reasons over the whole thread rather than the last message in it.Held
- 08Spoken student responsesRecord, hear it back, re-record, submit. Voice and text are equal modalities rather than an accommodation.Held
- 14Board summaries and instructional insightWho argued what, where the real disagreement sits, which passages were cited, and one recommended next move.Held
- 10Whole-class promptsSocraites drafts one next question; the teacher edits it and posts it. Nothing posts itself.Held
- 11Private individual promptsOff by default, teacher-approved, delivered privately. Never a public callout.Held
- 12Student exclusions and pauses"Prompts paused until Friday" — teacher-only, reason-free, auto-expiring, and excluded from every export.Held
- 13Bounded automatic board reviewRuns with caps, minimum intervals and silence in the opening period. The on-command half is built; the scheduled half is not.Partial
Safety What a student is allowed to receive
- 15Confinement to approved sourcesAnswers come only from what the teacher approved. No open web in school mode, and a retrieval failure produces silence rather than recall from the model's own memory.Held
- 16Prohibited-language and semantic enforcementA deterministic filter and a semantic classifier for sexual content, innuendo and harassment, on every student-facing output.Held
- 17Grounding validation, fail-closedIf it cannot be grounded, the student receives nothing. Silence is the designed failure mode, not an error state.Held
- 18Coarse durable records, ephemeral friction signalsA teacher sees "opened at 2:14pm," never "was attentive." Replay, pause and hesitation data expires by design and cannot be reconstructed afterwards.Held
Evidence What a learner accumulates
- 24Passage-anchored evidence"What in the text makes you think that?" — a response attaches to the sentence or scene supporting it, with provenance carried through. An anchor outside the approved envelope refuses.Held
- 23Learner evidence portfolioThe learner's own longitudinal record: what they read, what they claimed, what they cited, and what they revised after being challenged. Reading is deployed; export is gated.Held
- 26Metacognitive reflectionOccasional prompts on confidence and on what changed their mind, answered in the learner's own words. Never a number, never a score.Held
- 25Retrieval and return"What do you remember before you open the text?", plus reflection prompts the next day and the next week. Opt-in per room.Held
- 27Parent and mentor bounded viewA guardian sees only the artifacts a learner has explicitly shared — never a transcript stream. Specified; blocked from being built at all by the outstanding minors ruling.Remaining
Distribution How it reaches a partner
- 19A partner edition is configuration, never a forkA partner-branded experience over identical machinery, audited clean with no engine divergence anywhere in the diff.Live
Built alongside the twenty-seven
Four capabilities were ratified after the original scope and sit outside its numbering. Group mode gives a teacher member-scoped small groups, each with its own reasoning lens; a group is the same board object with a narrowed audience, enforced in the database rather than the interface, so a student cannot discover that another group's board exists. Reasoning frames apply philosophical traditions as Socratic lenses over the same content for older students. Source figures let a class interview a grounded primary-source voice, built from first-person material and constrained to speak only from it. Learning on the map places curriculum locations geographically, each with its own reading and discussion, with device location guardian-gated and off by default.
Surfaces
Who sees what
The separations are structural rather than presentational. An administrator cannot see a teacher's profile because it is excluded by name in both the contract and the code — not because a screen happens to omit it.
| Surface | Who | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Socratic tutor | Student | The one-to-one conversation, grounded in the teacher's materials, with read-aloud and decoding support. A standing banner discloses that the teacher can see it. |
| Story reader | Student | One line at a time, per-sentence audio, scene artwork. Guided, independent and seminar variants. |
| Discussion board | Student | Post in text or voice, reply, and cite a passage as evidence. Whole-class, or a member-scoped group. |
| Teacher hub | Teacher | Classes, assignments, board summaries, the safety-mode selector, the teaching-style profile, and the approval queue where drafted prompts wait with their verification result attached. |
| Source-figure console | Teacher | Author a grounded primary-source figure, test-drive it, then release it to a class. |
| Family view | Guardian | Dependants, age-band controls and consent. The bounded artifact-sharing view is specified but not built. |
| Administration | Institution | Pricing configuration, usage and cost, and return-rate metrics. Deliberately excludes teacher profiles and student exclusion records. |
| Public demonstrations | Anyone | Passwordless and accountless: no saved audio, no history, no boards, no analytics. Permanently so. |
| Book rooms | Consumer | A solo or invited room bound to one work and a reading boundary, with chapters, pace, posts and syntheses. Built; not yet switched on. |
Remaining
What stands between here and a classroom
The engineering is substantially complete. What remains is almost entirely legal and institutional, and it is deliberately not being routed around.
- The minors rulingThe largest gate. It blocks institutional deployment, any pilot involving minors, and the building — not merely the release — of the parent and mentor view. Everything else waits behind it.
- Outside education counsel and a data processing agreementNo school deployment has occurred and none will before this is finalised. Two questions are open for counsel: whether biometric statutes reach retained oral-exam audio, and how recording-consent law maps onto the oral-exam surface.
- Age-banded custodyUnder-13 is structurally absent: there is no retention path and no enrolment path, by construction rather than by policy. The guardian-consent flow for ages 13 to 17 is specified and unbuilt.
- PricingThe recorded consumer terms stand pending a separate ruling. No price appears on any public surface, because none has been ratified.
- Institutional entitlementsSeat-level entitlement records do not exist yet, and they are a prerequisite before a second institutional partner could ship safely alongside the first.
- Partner attributionAttribution fields exist in every pack and are deliberately empty. No partner name or mark appears anywhere until an agreement is signed and cleared.
Nothing here is validated. It is built, deployed, red-teamed and held — and it is held on purpose, because the gate that matters most protects the children who have not used it yet.