Confucius’ New Teaching Idea “Sharing Teachers’ Errors” and New Development for Chinese Pedagogy

Learning from errors is a very fundamental way of learning. Many a teacher in schools, and even colleges and universities mostly concentrates on encouraging students to learn from their own errors, but not so much from  their teachers’. Confucius’ educational thought observed through the scientific method of trial and error demonstrates the new teaching idea, sharing teachers’ errors with students, which is expressed implicitly in The Analects more than 2,500 years ago. The new teaching idea “sharing teachers’ errors” systematically we find in Confucius’ thoughts can provide a new problem domain for Chinese pedagogy, which will lead to the change of understanding teacher concept, moral education, democratic education, teaching evaluation system, etc., and invite further research.