A: The historical development of pedagogy is determined by social development and educational practice. In primitive society, there was neither science nor pedagogy. With the development of productive forces, the emergence of characters and the accumulation of knowledge, the germination of pedagogy appeared in slave society and feudal society. That is to say, before modern times, people's understanding of education mainly stayed at the level of experience and custom, and did not form a systematic rational understanding, which became the "learning" of education. Therefore, we can call this stage of educational awareness activities "pre-pedagogy period".

The educational achievements made in this period are mainly reflected in the philosophical or ideological works of some philosophers and thinkers. For example, The Analects of Confucius, a great educator in ancient China, collected his comments on philosophy, politics, ethics and education. Plato, an ancient Greek philosopher, expounded his educational thoughts in his philosophical work The Republic.

In human history, the earliest book devoted to education was China's Xue Ji, which had a far-reaching impact on the education of later generations. In addition, there are Han Yu's Shi Shuo, Zhu's Reading Quotations and Yan Yuan's Xue Ji. There are exquisite and special expositions about the relationship between teachers and students and how to study.

The earliest specialized educational work in the West is The Principle of Eloquence by quintilian, an educator of the ancient Roman Empire. Later, many thinkers in the Middle Ages and Renaissance also had some special expositions on education in their philosophical and sociological works.

All educational works in this period mostly appeared in the form of papers, and the ways of thinking and discussion mostly used some mechanical analogies, metaphors, aphorisms and fables, etc., which stayed in the description of experience, lacked scientific theoretical analysis, formed a complete system and did not form a special pedagogy language, so it could only be said that it was the bud or embryonic form of pedagogy.

However, just because this period is pre-pedagogic, we can't ignore the value of human educational understanding in this period, especially the educational understanding of those great thinkers. On the contrary, we should attach great importance to their ideological achievements and many profound and incisive views during this period. On the one hand, because their educational thoughts guided people's educational activities at that time, we could not deeply understand the educational practice at that time without a deep understanding of their educational thoughts; On the other hand, because their educational thoughts contain a lot of scientific elements, they have had and will continue to have a far-reaching impact on the formation and development of educational science in the future.