when socrates met confusious当苏格拉底遇到孔夫子

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Good morning! Ladies and gentlemen:

Today, I’m very glad to be here to share with you some of my ideas about the topic: when Socrates met Confucius.

Socrates, a sage in the Western history, and Confucius, a sage in the Eastern history, both are very famous educationists and philosophers.

In ancient society, people couldn’t have a formal school to learn knowledge. It was these two philosophers, Socrates and Confucius, who set up schools of different style to bring light into people’s confused minds.

So, Socrates and Confucius are great educationists in human history.

But, Great educationists as they were, they had quite different teaching methods.

As of their methods, let’s image a scene!

One day, Socrates and Confucius were giving their own students a lesson on Truths.

Confucius would say: “My students, today, I will teach you what is a truth and how to distinguish between true and false.”and then presented some examples, mostly stories, to help students understand truths.

Socrates: he would ask at first: “Dear sirs, this time, please tell me what a truth is?”Having been replied, he would not give out any comment and just kept on asking: “then dear sir, what is a fallacy!”“How can you distinguish them?” By such endless questioning and even debating, he cultivated students’ own ability to reason, to deduce and to put forward a conclusion themselves.

From the above-mentioned example, it is clear that Confucius favors giving instructions and directions to his students while Socrates more willing to question students, debate with them, inspiring them to independently find instructions and directions.

Just as a saying-- Different minds lead to different ways. And, different minds of great sages even lead to different foundations for some systems. Socrates and Confucius, the two greatest pioneers, have brought the West and the East different educational systems. The East, especially China, stresses passing down knowledge but a little omits cultivating independent thinking, while the West focuses on independent thinking and reasoning ability but a bit overlooks fundamental knowledge.

Just like, we can’t say who is the greatest educationist in human history, Socrates or Confucius? There is still no perfect one among their separated teaching methods.

So, we just need to make Socrates meet Confucius ---I mean, mix their different methods together---let one’s advantages make up for the other’s disadvantages. Such meeting, of course, would bring human beings more benefits quite beyond these two great men’s expectations.