The case method is built on visible self discovery in the classroom and on the assumption that students have insights and knowledge worth sharing. The classroom is the laboratory for testing problem solving techniques before entering the business world.
It can be said flatly that the mere act of listening to wise statements and sound advice does little for anyone. It is not always easy for students to accept the challenge of responsible activity. Nor is it always easy for instructors to preserve the needed open-mindedness toward their students' contributions.
Thinking out original answers to new problems or giving new interpretations to old problems is assumed in much undergraduate instruction to be an adult function and, as such, one properly denied to students. The task of students commonly is taken to be one chiefly of familiarizing themselves with accepted thoughts and techniques to be actively used at some later time.
Instructors are particularly tempted to tell what they know. They feel that they know the answers and, with unselfish abandon, they are willing to tell all. Their students are thus saved all the time and effort it would have taken them to work things out for themselves, even granted they ever could work out such excellent answers. However, we cannot effectively use the insight and knowledge of others; it must be our own knowledge and insight that we use. The virtue of the case method is that it takes students out of the role of passive absorbers and makes them partners in the learning process.
Many of the above thoughts are adapted from "Because Wisdom Can't Be Taught," by Charles I. Gragg in the Harvard Alumni Bulletin, October 19, 1940.