What Can the Ancients Teach Us? Instruction and Knowledge in Ancient Greece and China
Keywords:
Education and Training, Classical Philosophy, Chinese PhilosophyAbstract
The pedagogical crisis that the West faces today, so brilliantly foreseen by Hannah Arendt in this essay “The Crisis in Education”, is now confirmed by all those educators who must confront daily the result of diluting pedagogical standards and the loss of moral and professional authority. Education is essential in defining a country’s quality of life and, therefore, a crisis in education is also a crisis in all spheres, including social, financial and, last but not least, political. The present paper seeks to explore, through two different models –Greece and China–, how education and knowledge were understood in antiquity and to what extend classical philosophers can still teach us, with common sense, how to deal with such methodological problems. Using a comparative approach, we will analyze Greek theories of knowledge and epistemological and pedagogical issues in classical and early medieval Confucianism, emphasizing their strategies to defend against relativism, opinion and empty accumulation of wisdom, and to advocate truth and scientific and meticulous selection of knowledge. Finally, we will stress the urging necessity of recovering our classical heritage in order to properly improve educational standards.
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