>Had I just told people "Don't get eliminated in a 5v4! Do you understand?" and they said "Yes!" I wouldn't really know if they understood or not.
That seems like less of an issue of using the Socratic method, and more about quantifying the cost of getting killed. "Dying costs your team X" is more helpful than "don't die". The former tells you under which conditions the heuristic "don't die" is no longer applicable, while the latter doesn't.
The lesson is "quantifying the cost of getting killed".
The method by which that lesson is conveyed to the student is the Socratic method.
The point is that the Socratic method of asking leading questions and building agreement at each stage was more effective in getting the point across than "do you understand X? OK, good."
The student constructs the knowledge him/herself and internalizes it better than otherwise.
Yes, it's better than asking if they understand the assertion of the point, but the parent was giving a misleading comparison to something that stripped out both the Socratic questions and the quantification of the cost.
That seems like less of an issue of using the Socratic method, and more about quantifying the cost of getting killed. "Dying costs your team X" is more helpful than "don't die". The former tells you under which conditions the heuristic "don't die" is no longer applicable, while the latter doesn't.
Or, to use my attempt at a neologism, your method satisfies the Scylla-Charybdis Heuristic, while "Don't get eliminated" doesn't: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2015/12/the-scylla-charybd...