Western and Eastern Philosophies

The Western philosophy of education began in ancient Greece, and it was divided into two famous philosophies which are idealism and realism. It started first by Socrates, who was an idealist, who encourage people to think and ask them a questions that lead them to think and to search for the truth under the name of the “dialectic method”. Then Plato comes, who was Socrates’s student, and wrote down both the dialectic method and the Platonic thinking in his famous book “The Republic”. He established an academy where the teaching was applied, his method was also political education and questioning that lead the people think. Idealist prefer Bloom’s hierarchy of knowledge and Maslow pyramid of human needs as an aim of education. The most important thing was to search for the truth and not the truth itself. Regarding the methods and curriculum, they used the dialectic method, intuition and revelation. After the idealism, it comes the realism the rejects the idealist notion that only ideas are real. Realists, as Aristotle, believe that also matter can be trusted, he developed the view that although ideas might be important, a proper study of matter lead to better ideas. Both idealists and realists gaining knowledge is the first thing they talked about, but the difference is how to gain it. Realists used matter to understand knowledge, to be able to control it, so they used observation and experiments in their curriculum, which is a scientific method. The teacher has a common role in both idealism and realism, which was to facilitate students and to push them toward thinking, to possess a good values and giving rewards, to ask questions and let them think not to think for them. Of course, the history of this philosophy includes many more figures other than the mentioned above; other major philosophers were Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Francis Bacon, John Locke, Rene Descartes and many others.

As the Western Philosophy, there is Eastern Philosophy or Asian philosophy which includes the various philosophies that originated in East and South Asia. For example, Chinese philosophy, Japanese philosophy, Indian philosophy and Korean philosophy are more dominant in East and Vietnam. Eastern philosophy has no one goal in education, it provides information about the nature so that one could deal with them in a right way. Eastern philosophy talked about suffering in life and to accept this suffering because it is a part of our life, and it has external and internal causes. The aim from accepting this suffering helps us gain wisdom. Moreover, they talked about diminishing sense experiences, because change is important and one cannot live a good life without thoughts that brings the change. Attitude shaping is also important and the large social change often begins with individual change. All these was regarding the aims of education and its method and curriculum used.