John Dewey vs. Confucius: Similarities and Differences in Their Educational Thoughts
- DOI
- 10.2991/assehr.k.210120.009How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- The educational thoughts of Dewey, The educational thoughts of Confucius, Similarities, Dissimilarities
- Abstract
This study aims to compare the similarities and differences in the educational thoughts of Dewey and Confucius. To start with, this study examines their shared opinions on education’s function to improve the state of society, education’s essence of transferring experience, and practice’s central role in teaching process. Then this study explores their diverged educational thoughts regarding the goal of education, the mode of education, and the role of teachers. First, Confucius proposes that education has an ultimate goal of cultivating people with virtues while Dewey believes that educational goal should be continually adjusted and upgraded based on students’ expectations. Besides, Confucius promotes a text-centred learning approach and regards the wisdom of the sage as the root of knowledge while Dewey emphasizes a student-centred education mode and believes that knowledge is sourced through the process of inquiry and independent thinking. Furthermore, Dewey regards teachers as facilitators whereas Confucius considers them, except for facilitators, also as role models. It is hoped that this study can provide insights into the development and integration of Chinese and Western education based on the in-depth analysis of the aforementioned sections.
- Copyright
- © 2021, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.
- Open Access
- This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Kexin Xu AU - Xiaona Wang PY - 2021 DA - 2021/01/20 TI - John Dewey vs. Confucius: Similarities and Differences in Their Educational Thoughts BT - Proceedings of the 2020 3rd International Seminar on Education Research and Social Science (ISERSS 2020) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 42 EP - 45 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.210120.009 DO - 10.2991/assehr.k.210120.009 ID - Xu2021 ER -