Who are the representatives of traditional education theory?

The first representative of traditional education theory is Ansari, the authoritative master of Islam. Ansari was one of the most prominent doctrinal scholars and philosophers of medieval Islam, and he taught at the University of Nizam, a prestigious institution of learning in the Seljuk dynasty, in his prime. Ansari's educational thought was particularly focused on religious mystical experience, but it did not absolutely deny the role of rational thinking, logical argumentation, and empirical observation. In his later years, his discourse on religion and philosophy in such works as The Destruction of the Philosophers and The Revival of the Islamic Religious Disciplines is also a concentrated manifestation of his religious education ideas. According to Ansari, religious faith consists of two parts, inner faith and external behavior, which are complementary and indispensable. Ansari suggests that knowledge and faith belong to different domains, with "knowledge" being the domain of reason and "faith" being the domain of the mind, and that the two cannot be substituted for each other; the authority of reason is confined to the domain of knowledge, but has no place in the domain of faith. Out of his skepticism about man's perceptual and rational knowledge, Ansari argued that faith must be reduced to an activity of the mind and reason confined to the realm of knowledge. For the former, the starting point should be the Lord's command, which begins with the experience of the self and the knowledge of God through telepathy and inner integrity; for the latter, reason should be regarded as a tool for framing the faith, and used to educate the general believers who have gone astray, but it should be used with caution, just as a doctor prescribes potent and poisonous medicines. He was also of the view that in order to restore the status of the "right faith", it was necessary to strengthen religious education for the general believers so that they would know the basic beliefs without having to understand them. He wrote the "Muslim Popular Letter Outline" in his later years, which is a popular religious textbook that is easy to recite and memorize for this purpose.