When Socrates Meets Confucius
Distinguished judges, ladies and gentlemen, good morning.
People say we youth are the happiest. But belive it or not, we are not, we are actually annoyed by the study staff. What’s worse, we students are invariably got blamed for it by the parents or the teachers. But the blame may not be due so much to ourselves as to Socrates and Confucius as the modern education way is so deeply influenced by the two famous teachers.
Socrates and Confucius, the two famous saint teachers both taught through dialogues as the main way of teaching. The dialogues between Socrates and his students is in the form of “ teachers’ constantly asking and students’ following thinking and answering.” while the later form is “ students’ asking and teachers’ answering.” Thus, the Socrates’ students shaped the habit of critical thinking, so did the later western students. And the Confucius’s students could remember and recite a lot of the taught knowledge, so did we Chinese students.
The problem, also the reason why we students annoyed is the backwards of their teaching methods because the nowadays teaching methods are dated back to theirs. The Socratic way are only most suited for those who are good at debating. While the debating is hard to come to results, the students learn less knowledge. And with Socrates’ constantly serious asking and almost no praise, the students were often so depressed. In this point, the students of Confucius are luckier. Confucius gave courages whenever the students behaved well and taught students according to their aptitude. However, we Chinese students know that we are so painful to remember and recite so much textbooks knowledge. And the society feels so pity about the Chinese students’ machine-like minds-- we dot not think much and habitually waiting for answers.
This summer vocation, I tutored a student in the secondary school. Like most Chinese children, the student shaped the bad of waiting for answers and not thinking actively. I remember in one class, I asked him three questions relative to the taught knowledge, he hook his head straight away and said “I don’t know”. I then kept asking the fourth question, “What equals one plus one?” “I don’t know”, he answered immediately. After a short silence of embarrassment, we both laughed and he said it equals two. See, in most cases, we know the answer if we think. After that time, I forced him not to say “I don’t know” in my class and instead saying “Let me think ” whenever he wants to say “I don’t know”. It worked well, he then often forced himself to think like this and he got great progress.
The Confucius way of teaching deprived our critical thinking ability and left us countless textbooks to remember; while the Socratic way of teaching made us depressed and in high pressure when we are not good at debating.
So when Socrates meets Confucius, we do hope that they could talk about their teaching methods and learn from each other. Actually, why not we arranging their meeting by combining the advantages of their teaching method-- to learn happily and to think critically.