The Socratic method's own description treats it as a classroom technique: a teacher probes a student's stated beliefs with further questions, testing their internal consistency, rather than transmitting information directly. Look at the same shape outside a classroom and it turns out to be one of the most exported techniques in the practice of argument. A trial lawyer cross-examining a witness is not teaching anything, but the questioning has the identical shape: each answer becomes the material for the next question, narrowing the witness toward a contradiction in their own prior testimony rather than the lawyer simply asserting one. The method's own central question, whether sustained questioning of someone's stated beliefs can expose contradictions and move them toward a more coherent position without anyone stating the correction outright, describes a courtroom as accurately as it describes a classroom.
The same shape appears again in psychotherapy, under the name Socratic questioning, a core technique of cognitive behavioral therapy in which a therapist asks a client a sequence of questions about a belief the client already holds, rather than telling the client the belief is mistaken. The entity's own account of what the method is most effective for, developing critical thinking and argumentation because it treats one question as leading to further questions rather than settling on a single transmitted answer, is exactly why the technique survived the move from a philosophy teacher's dialogue to a therapist's office and a witness stand alike. What changes across the three settings is the goal: education aims at understanding, cross-examination aims at impeachment, therapy aims at changed behavior. What does not change is the refusal to just tell the other person the answer.