WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at [1] dougbelshaw.com... [2]

It’s easy to get caught up in 21st century pedagogy and technology but some things to do with teaching and education are almost timeless. Confucius, a Chinese philosopher whose dates are c.551-479 B.C. is a thinker who, despite living two-and-a-half millennia ago still has something relevant to say to educators today…

Confucius’ sayings were collected together in The Analects (or The Sayings). He is said to have always answered questions asked by his disciples according to their character and need, something as teachers we need to bear in mind. Sometimes there isn’t an ‘right’ answer, at least as far as ’soft’ skills are concerned.

We’ll go through a few of Confucius’ sayings, therefore, and attempt to relate them to 21st century pedagogy:

The Master said: ‘If you govern the people by laws, and keep them in order by penalties, they will avoid the penalties, yet lost their sense of shame. But if you govern them by your moral excellence, and keep them in order by your dutiful conduct, they will retain their sense of shame, and also live up to this standard.’

This reminds me of the adage that children often don’t listen to what their elders say yet they never fail to imitate them. As teachers, as adults in positions of responsibility we must be more than excellent practitioners. We must be role models, examples of values that we wish to instill in our young people. By our actions as well as our words we must treat students in ways we expect them to treat others. This means praising in public but criticising in private, treating students (despite their deficiencies) as if they were almost your own children, and relating to them in a calm, adult manner which they can come to imitate.

The Master said: ‘He who keeps on reviewing his old and acquiring new knowledge may become a teacher of others.’

Teachers need to be learners too. It’s a sad thing to see when some teachers who have been in the profession a long time lose that zest and passion for education because they are not learning themselves. Often they become cynical and dictatorial in attitude, treating students as stereotypes rather than individuals.

Kathy Sierra, on her excellent [3] Creating Passionate Users blog, discusses the importance of practising the fundamentals regularly in order to become an expert. She gives the example of Tiger Woods, who is often observed going over the basics time and time again until they are almost automatic. In football (soccer to my American readers) 99% of the game consists of doing the simple things well. Only 1% is the spark of brilliance that can win games. By making sure that the 99% of our basic teaching toolkit is sound by continually refining it that 1% can have even more effect!

The Master said: ‘Learning without thinking is useless. Thinking without learning is dangerous.’

Thankfully rote learning is on its way out but some still remains. On top of that, some ‘learning activities’ are little more than comprehension exercises involving very little thinking. Education is about stretching the mind so that it doesn’t return to the same proportions as before. It is about enlightenment and broadening the mind to encompass ideas and concepts not necessarily encountered in everyday life. It is about changing people for the better, not keeping students occupied.

At the same time, the second part of what Confucius has to say is important as well, for a number of reasons. Without some kind of education in tolerance, thinking can be a dangerous act. The Nazis, for example, weren’t idiots - they had quite sophisticated theories on why Jews should be persecuted and, in the end, removed from the face of the earth. The trouble is that they hadn’t had a liberal and broad-minded education which enabled them to think properly. Their thinking was narrow and with horrific results.

The Master said: ‘The wise man is informed in what is right. The inferior man is informed in what will pay.’

This, in the 21st century, brings up the issue of vocational education. Real learning is not necessarily about financial reward, which is why choosing a degree solely on the basis of the job it may or may not gain you at the end of it is short-sighted. Vocational education can be valuable as a supplement to academic education, but when it is seen as an end-in-itself can be distracting and misdirected. Learning by doing is all very well but there are values contained in academic education that cannot be transmitted (or at least it is very difficult to transmit) via vocational education.

The Master said: ‘Learn as if you were not reaching your goal, and as though you were afraid of missing it.’

This could be rewritten with ‘Teach…’ instead of ‘Learn…’ and be made more relevant from a teaching point of view. Teaching is an art and not something that can be ‘mastered’ and therefore one should always have a target to achieve or something to add to one’s teaching repertoire. To some extent, of course, teachers already do this in a negative sense. Exam results are a constant source of concern and targets relating to them are constantly moving. This is not what I mean. Instead, I mean targets set by oneself in order to facilitate one’s own professional development.

Fan Ch’ih… meeting Tzu Hsia said to him: ‘A little while ago, when I had an interview with the Master, and asked for a definition of knowledge, he replied, "By promoting the straight and degrading the crooked you can make even the crooked straight."

Behaviour management is difficult. No matter how many times you hear as a teacher that you need to praise the positive rather than dwelling on and criticizing the negative, it can be extremely hard to do in practice. My wife, a primary school teacher, is great at doing this. Instead of telling pupils what they shouldn’t be doing, she tells them what they should be doing, congratulating and encouraging the ones who are behaving or doing things which meet with her approval, whilst either ignoring or keeping to a minimum the amount of attention given to behaviours at odds with what she expects. I find this hard to do, although I’m working on it!

The Master said: ‘If a ruler is himself upright, his people will do their duty without orders; but if he himself be not upright, although he may order they will not obey.’

With respect to teaching, this is all about giving students a framework within in to work and to apply praise and sanctions consistently. As mentioned above, teachers need to be role models in attitudes and values and this along with a consistent approach can lead to a more peaceful and purposeful environment.

The Master said: ‘He who does not hold the office does not discuss its policy.’

Confucius repeats this in The Analects on more than one occasion. In our culture it is almost seen as a right to discuss the ins and outs of the decisions and policies involved in various people’s positions of responsibility. With the government in a democratic system this is understandable and acceptable, to some extent. However, the carping and undermining that can go on in educational institutions by those not involved in the processes which lead to important decisions can be destructive. It may sound obvious, but to have the right to complain that a person isn’t doing their job properly, you need to know the balancing acts and different tensions with which they have to deal.

The Master said: ‘He who demands much from himself and little from others will avoid resentment.’

There’s an obvious application of this that I don’t want to make: of course teachers should demand a lot from their students in terms of application and understanding. However, that should be dwarfed by what individual teachers demand of themselves. I’m a firm believer that resources shouldn’t take longer to make than the length of time for which students use them (well, most of the time!) but it’s no coincidence that teachers have traditionally put in more hours than they those for which they are contracted. Teachers should have a passion and commitment to education that goes beyond mere employment. Teaching is a vocation, a demanding occupation which should lead to self-improvement both professionally and personally.

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