Critical Thinking: A Reinterpretation of Confucian Philosophy of Education

Continue reading…https://m.scirp.org/papers/77724

“Thus viewed, knowledge that is passed or transmitted can serve as a starting point for critical investigation. It is this transmitted knowledge that lays the ground for people to examine its hidden assumptions and arguments, so as to detect and correct any inconsistency in the old knowledge.
Adopting an open-ended perspective on the learning process, Dewey sees the acquisition of existing knowledge as a facilitation rather than impairment to the configuration of “what is to be done”, or, in Freire’s [2] words, “a task of re-creating that knowledge”. It seems that memorising transmitted knowledge and the development of creative consciousness do not necessarily pose an either- or choice, as is indicated by Freire’s theory; it would be more rational to view these two as virtuously complementary to each other…