Confucius' And Socrates' Educational Thoughts & Practices And Their Enlightenments On TESL In China

Confucius and Socrates have always been acclaimed, in China and the West, as Monumental thinkers whose teachings and ideas serve like inexhaustible fountains from which world education drains for progress from birth to thriving. The two giants, each in view of his specific historic and social context, initiated from heritage and tradition, exploring paths to imparting, decoding, enlightening and apprenticing, thus to cultivate whole persons and promote life quality. The former took stake in human nature and society, with emphasis on virtues and advocacy of protocols, cherishing profound faith in ruling the world in peace and order by disgracing the wicked and honoring the kind. The latter stood a firm footing on humanitarian and rationality, resorting to reasons and seeking truths, upholding democracy and selfness, thus to open doors to approaching and conquering the nature. To sum up, their pedagogical philosophies effect, respectively, far-reaching influence on the track and forward movement of Chinese and western education.Keeping a foothold from comparative culture perspective, this thesis investigates the similarities and disparities between educational thoughts of Confucius and Socrates, by verifying original literatures and reviewing the social and historical sources that result in the disparity. For the sake of scientifically understanding, evaluating and carrying on or abrogating the ancient educational thoughts and traditions, this research tries to locate the root that brings about the inefficiency in Chinese current foreign language education and teaching, and some suggestions are provided to conduct certain reforms.The thesis is structured in five chapters. It begins with introducing the background of selecting this topic, aim of the study, methodology, significance and the layout. And it proceeds to literature review in which relevant concepts are defined, previous researches classified and summarized with necessary comments in between. The core of this thesis lies in chapter three. Through analyzing related history, this chapter elaborates educational philosophy of both Confucius and Socrates, and retraces their mission and practice. Moreover, their respective teaching contents and views on teachers and students are summarized. Chapter four highlights the enlightenments obtained from the above mentioned comparisons. Some conceptions of Socrates are particularly helpful:speculative spirit and innovation encouragement inspire us to independently establish theories and methods regarding foreign language education and teaching; For the students, they should draw a lesson from the independent and creative learning styles influenced by Socrates; the democracy spirit offers reference to transform the teaching mode from "teacher-centeredness" to "students-centeredness"; meanwhile, his view of equality encourages us to attach due attention to the whole-person development.Tentative and bold and explorative conclusions are reached in the final chapter. Through comparing the educational thoughts of Confucius and Socrates, new observations are found concerning their different educational philosophy and views on teachers and students. Due to the limit of the author's knowledge in pedagogy, history and comparative culturology, limitations of this research are inevitable. Therefore, future researches are expected to take more critical attitudes to and inherit Confucius'and Socrates'educational thoughts and practices, so that both the new development of TESL and education reform can be better promoted.