Through the course of my online interactions in the Pagan community over the last 15+ years, as well as the interfaith work I've started doing in some of my other hobby groups, and dealing with close friends becoming interested in Wicca, I've noticed a trend that I don't think we've discussed here...
How much should one mentor/guide a newbie? And how much should they be encouraged/forced to figure out on their own?
I started learning about Wicca on my own, and have a spiritual teacher who leads me to ideas to explore and then leaves me to get to it. I've not really taken any sort of "traditional" classes on Wicca where one is spoon-fed a course of information.
And maybe that's the crux of things for me... how much one should expect to be spoon-fed when they are, in essence, striking out on a path to find a new faith. Is it a culture-shift, that folks expect the proper information to always be available under their fingertips if they have the right keywords?
So what do you think? How should seekers and students be approached? Is using a Socratic-type method still valuable today? Or should we just give up and give them whatever tidbits of info they want so they don't just Google it and get 15 dubious answers?
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