Every subject has its process of emergence, development and perfection, and pedagogy is no exception. Generally speaking, pedagogy has experienced a long historical evolution from the emergence of primitive education to the germination of pedagogy, from the formation of an independent discipline system of pedagogy to the perfection of scientific pedagogy.

The development of pedagogy has a history of more than 300 years. Generally speaking, the emergence and development of pedagogy can be divided into four stages.

The embryonic stage of pedagogy

In slave society and feudal society, pedagogy did not form a complete system, and all works on pedagogy only stayed on the description of experience, lacking scientific theoretical analysis and not yet forming a complete system. Therefore, pedagogy at this time is still in the primary stage.

The educational thoughts and experiences of some thinkers, politicians and educators in ancient times are scattered in philosophical works or political science works. For example, The Analects of Confucius is a collection of comments on philosophy, politics and education made by Confucius, a great thinker in ancient China. Confucius' educational thoughts, such as "no anger, no anger, no happiness", "learning without thinking is useless, thinking without learning is dangerous" and "learning while learning", have had a great influence on the education of later generations. The educational thought of Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, is also mixed in his philosophical work The Republic.