Learning without thought is labour lost; thought without learning is perilous.
Analects II.15, in Legge's translation. The line balances two failures open to a student: accumulating texts without reflecting on them, and reasoning without the knowledge that would check the reasoning. It is among the most quoted Confucian sayings in Chinese education, and the balance it asks for is the one teachers still argue over between knowledge and skills.
In practice
- A course that assesses only recall produces students who know every date and cannot say why any of it mattered.
- A clever student who skips the reading builds an elegant argument on a fact the reading would have corrected.
- Standing
- Compare zhengming, the Analects' other principle about getting the words and the things to match.
- Subject
- Learning & Education
- Essay
- Theories of teaching, and what schools are for