Re-envisioning Chinese Education

The meaning of person-making in a new age

Guoping Zhao, Zongyi Deng, Guoping Zhao, Zongyi Deng

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138818170
• eBook ISBN: 9781317595281
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Maintaining education as a pedagogical space for human formation, this book is distinctive in looking at the crisis rather than the success of Chinese education. The editors and contributors, mostly overseas and mainland Chinese scholars, argue that modern Chinese education has been built upon a superficial and instrumental embrace of Western modernity and a fragmented appropriation of Chinese cultural heritage. They call for a rethinking and re-envisioning of Chinese education, grounded in and enriched by various cultural traditions and cross-cultural dialogues. Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, curriculum and pedagogical theories, the collected volume analyzes (1) why education as person-making has failed to take root in contemporary China, (2) how the purpose of education has changed during the process of China's modernization, and (3) what a rediscovery of the meaning of person-making implies for rethinking and re-envisioning Chinese education in the current age of globalization and social change. Re-envisioning Chinese Education: The meaning of person-making in a new age discusses among other issues:

• China's Historical Encounter with the West and Modern Chinese Education
• Rediscover Lasting Values: Confucian Cultural Learning Models in the Twenty-first Century
• Rethinking and Re-envisioning Chinese Didactics: Implications from the German Didaktik Tradition
• The New Basic Education and the Development of Human Subjectivity: A Chinese Experience

This book will be relevant for scholars, researchers, and policy makers everywhere who seek a more balanced, more sophisticated, and philosophically better grounded understanding of Chinese education.

1
Introduction

Guoping Zhao and Zongyi Deng

With China’s rapid geo-political and economic rise in recent years, education in China has attracted considerable attention all over the world. Education has been seen as the ‘secret’ to China’s economic transformation. The number of Chinese students entering the global workforce having studied abroad, especially in the fields of science and engineering, and the remarkable performance of Shanghai students in the 4th Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), have led many to believe that the Chinese model of rigorous education holds lessons for other education systems around the world. Thomas J. Baker, for example, in his book (2013), Exploring Chinese Education: Triangulation Theory, offers a set of ‘lessons’ from China’s education system in response to China’s high performance in the PISA test.

Yet, behind the facade of educational ‘success’ is a public concern in Chinese communities across the world that education in China is in a state of crisis. Relentless criticism can be heard on social media, and it seems to come from all corners of Chinese society, including some of the most influential public intellectuals, such as the winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in literature, Mo Yan (莫言). In his scathing article, The Hypocritical Education, Mo notes that when a few Chinese newspapers opened forums on current conditions in Chinese education, they immediately drew tremendous attention, with criticism flooding in. Besides the criticism that Chinese education has become commodified and schools are run like businesses and that instructional methods are outdated and rote learning still predominates, much of the criticism questions the value orientations governing Chinese education. Critics claim that China’s basic education is concerned only with test scores and that higher education has become merely job training (基础教育是分数教育, 大学教育是职业教育; Lao, 2013). Teachers are seen as interested only in social status and monetary gain rather than genuine knowledge production and consumption, and students are seen as only being interested in good scores and the benefit of social mobility such scores can bring them, rather than having a genuine passion for and interest in learning. Learning is seen as purely exam-oriented and students’ knowledge base as inadequate to meet their life challenges.

If we apply Biesta’s theory of the purposes of education (Biesta, 2009) to the criticisms of Chinese education, we see that the criticisms encompass all three functions/purposes: the function of qualification – education should provide students with the knowledge, skills, abilities, and dispositions to fulfil their future job challenges (p. 39); the function of socialization – education should teach students to ‘become members of and part of particular social, cultural and political “orders”’ (p. 40); and the function of subjectification – education should allow students to become unique, individual subjects (p. 40). For many critics, Chinese education has failed to teach the skills and abilities deemed necessary for China’s growing economy. It has failed to help students develop creativity and critical thinking skills; thus students are incapable of innovative work. Qian Xuesen’s (钱学森) famous question, ‘The Chinese are so smart and hardworking; why are we not producing innovative talent?’ (中国人 那么聪明, 那么勤奋, 为什么培养不出创新性的拔尖人才?), is often mentioned in discussion of the dire situation. On the other hand, many critics emphasize that students are not taught a basic sense of morality and how to be responsible citizens. Materialism dominates the social climate, and success is often judged only by the amount of money an individual makes. Social media are never short of reports of official corruption, dishonest business conduct, counterfeit products, and poisonous foods, incidents that indicate widespread disregard for law and reason and are seen as a sign of the failure of Chinese education. In a recent higher education conference, Beijing University professor Qian Liqun 钱理群 commented that Chinese universities are now producing ‘polished egoists’ (jingzhi de li ji zhuyi zhe 精致的利己主义者), who are more adept at and interested in using the system for their own benefit¹ than in becoming responsible social members who can fit in and contribute to society.

But above all, critics argue that Chinese education has mostly failed as a process of person-making and that this failure has contributed to the rapid deterioration of morality and spirituality in China. Underneath all the complaints about Chinese education, it seems, is the concern that Chinese education does not provide the conditions under which students can develop and become well-rounded, self-aware, and ethical and spiritual beings. Instead, in going through the Chinese educational system, students’ critical and creative potential is deeply stifled and their very being is subjected to alienation. The real issue, therefore, is that Chinese education has been so instrumentalized, either for political or economic reasons, that it is devoid of the basic purpose of person-making – in the sense of self-cultivation or self-formation. When education does not participate in nurturing the flourishing of the human person, it contributes to its degeneration. In the words of Zi Zhongjun (资中筠), a well-known scholar from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, ‘Chinese education now, from kindergarten on, teaches extreme materialism and instrumentalism, which completely wipe out creativity and imagination. . . . Education is destroying people! . . . If Chinese education does not change, our Chinese race will degenerate!’ (Zi, 2012).

However, the idea of person-making is at the heart of the Confucian heritage of educational thinking. It has long been held that self-cultivation is the precondition for cultivating the critical and creative potential of the individual and enabling him or her to fulfil social responsibilities and functions. From a Confucian perspective, becoming a responsible citizen, or a functional and capable worker, cannot be separated from becoming an ideal and genuine human person; and cultivating a responsible citizen starts with cultivating the inner self, the ideal person – the Junzi. Thus in Confucianism, the value of education is first to ‘help the person succeed in fulfilling or living up to what makes him a human being’ (Lee, 2000, p. 16). With the cultivation of an inner sagehood, the person can realize and fulfil his responsibility of outer ‘kingship’ in bringing peace and harmony to the world. Since Confucianism provides the cultural and philosophical foundation for Chinese education, person-making is at the core of Chinese educational thinking.

The centrality of self-formation is also deeply entrenched in the Western tradition of educational thinking. Since the time of Kant, modern Western education has been tasked with educating/nurturing the kinds of individuals who are rational, autonomous, law-abiding, and capable of critical and independent thinking, the kinds of subjects deemed necessary for the project of modernity. The realization of a nation’s inspiration for democracy and for economic and technological advancement is premised on the realization of the potentials of the human subjects as rational and autonomous beings. Thus modern education as person-making ‘is about producing rationally autonomous individuals’ (Wain, 1996, p. 351) and is a process of ‘liberation’ that is distinguished from domination, indoctrination or domestication.

Despite education in China having been ‘modernized’ through the adaptation of a school system from the West since the beginning of the twentieth century, together with Western curricular structure, theory, and practice, and despite numerous efforts having been made in recent years to rejuvenate the Confucian tradition of educational thinking, the concept of person-making, either in the Confucian or Western sense, has failed to take root in educational theory and practice in China. Thus it is a matter of recovering and reclaiming education’s intrinsic role in person-making that this book proposes to re-envision Chinese education as a process of person-making.

Written mostly by overseas and mainland Chinese scholars, this collected volume analyzes (1) why education as person-making has failed to take root in contemporary China; (2) how the purpose of education has changed during the process of China’s modernization; and (3) what a rediscovery of the meaning of person-making implies for rethinking and re-envisioning Chinese education in the current age of globalization and social change. Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, education and curriculum theories, contributors of the book pursue the analyses and discussions in relation to curriculum, teaching and learning, citizenship education, and educational reform.

The book is organized into three parts. Part I, Modernization and Chinese education: historical perspectives, consists of four chapters that critically examine problems facing education in China today from historical perspectives – concerning East–West encounters and China’s modernization over the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These four chapters, with different emphases, serve to explain why education as person-making has failed to take root in contemporary China, and shed light on how the meaning of person-making has changed over time.

Guoping Zhao (Chapter 2) presents a broad historical overview of China’s encounters with the West, with a focus on the ways of Chinese reformers in borrowing from the West and exploiting Chinese cultural traditions to revitalize the nation. The overview unveils the historical and cultural landscape in which contemporary Chinese education is embedded and operates – characterized by the ‘importation of a superficial and distorted form of modern Western civilization’ (p. 17) and the ‘fragmentation of China’s cultural traditions’ (p. 25). As such, education in China lacks solid philosophical and cultural grounds upon which a concept of the new Chinese person can be articulated, and from which substantial and coherent resources can be drawn for the educational purpose of person-making.

Wing-Wah Law (Chapter 3) examines various approaches to cultivating Chinese citizens during different historical epochs as China went through modernization and national revival at the interplay between nationalism and internationalization. The examination reveals that Confucianism has long been exploited for cultivating the obedience and loyalty of Chinese citizens. This is achieved by selecting certain Confucian values and norms, and rejecting others, to strengthen state control and foster social conformity. China’s social, political and educational milieus, Law argues, ‘have never been conducive to making free and autonomous persons’ (p. 35). Citizenship education in China has always been employed as a socialization vehicle, directed towards citizen-making rather than person-making.

Set against the backdrop of China’s encounters with the West, Limin Bai (Chapter 4) examines the changing meaning of Gewu zhizhi 格物致知 (‘investigating things and extending knowledge’) over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As an embodiment of the Neo-Confucian vision of person-making, Gewu zhizhi provided a powerful framework for Chinese intellectuals to integrate Western modern scholarship with traditional Chinese learning, and to balance scientific studies of natural phenomena with the pursuit of moral self-cultivation. However, such integration and balance was gradually lost following China’s humiliating defeat in the Opium war (1839–1842) due to a break with the Confucian tradition. Bai points to the shared humanistic values in the Confucian approach to education and in the Renaissance ideal of liberal education, and argues for the significance of the search for a common humanity in our rethinking of the purpose and practice of Chinese curriculum

Comparing the thoughts on individuality of Hu Shi (1891–1962) and Liang Shuming (1893–1988), Huajun Zhang (Chapter 5) seeks the root cause of the absence of person-making in terms of cultivating individuality in China’s contemporary education and proposes a return to the traditional emphasis on self-transformation. The comparative analysis identifies the instrumentalist mode of thinking that dominates China’s contemporary educational practices as the problem and suggests that the dichotomy between the ‘small self and big self,’ a notion that has been present throughout modern Chinese history, exacerbates this instrumentalism, paralleling the loss of China’s tradition of self-cultivation. Zhang proposes self-transformation as a way to build connections between ‘the small self’ and ‘the big self,’ thus overcoming the dualism of the individual and the others (‘the small self’ and ‘the big self’).

Part II, Rediscovering China’s cultural roots of education, presents five chapters devoted to re-discovering ideals and values embedded in Confucianism and Chinese folk culture for education as person-making. The contributors of these chapters, in varying degrees, challenge instrumentalism prevalent in contemporary educational thinking in China. Exploring different aspects of Chinese educational tradition, including The Imperial Civil Examination (keju 科举) (Chapter 6), Confucian moral education (Chapter 7), the virtue-oriented Confucian learning model (Chapter 8), and Huang Yanpei’s vocational education ideas (Chapter 9), these chapters rediscover the Chinese cultural roots of education, and make a case that education for person-making provides the essential precondition not only for the development of intellectual capacities like critical thinking and cross-cultural competence, but also for the cultivation of responsible, committed, and participatory citizens.

Zongjie Wu (Chapter 6) rediscovers the authentic pedagogic vision for person-making embedded in the Imperial Civil Examination (keju) – which has been blamed for its undue emphasis on memorization and regurgitation of the classic texts, and seen as the very antithesis to the Confucian vision of education centred on cultivating the gentleman (junzi). Based on an analysis of an eight-legged essay written by a candidate in the Examination, Wu shows that the Examination embodied a Confucian way of meaning-making grounded in the indigenous consciousness of classical texts, through establishing a language by means of which learners ‘could speak/act in the place of the sages’ (p. 98). Furthermore, he argues that such a Confucian way of meaning-making can not only contribute to the development of a deep understanding of the world, and of the moral virtue to act properly in society, but also yield possibilities for learners to achieve practical competence and skills in the modern world.

Set against the backdrop of current revival of Confucianism in China, Xiaoling Ke (Chapter 7) explores the implication of Confucianism for contemporary moral education. Based on an analysis of the notions of person-making and citizen-making in the Confucian tradition, she argues that person-making in terms of self-cultivation is the precondition for citizen-making because citizens are not obedient and passive but capable of independent thinking, taking initiative, and assuming social responsibility. Therefore, moral education in China needs to ‘embrace the original Confucian person-making (inner sagehood) and citizen-making (outer kingliness), and guard against the appropriation of Confucianism to serve ideological purposes’ (p. 117).

Based on decades of empirical research, Jin Li (Chapter 8) presents the virtue-oriented Confucian learning model (vis-à-vis Western-mind-oriented model) that has lasting effect on Chinese children’s learning experience. Deeply entrenched in the Confucian-heritage cultures, this model is centrally concerned with learning to be a person or person-making, including cultivating the moral and social self, fulfilling one’s roles and responsibilities, making social contribution, and committing to doing or action. She contends that grounding in the Confucian cultural heritage is an indispensable condition for the development of children’s cultural identity and self-confidence, as well as learning and growth in other cultures. However, Confucian cultural values have been ‘tarnished’ over 150 years of China’s tumultuous history. Rediscovery and restoration of these values thus becomes an urgent and important task.

Through examining a set of important writings of Huang Yanpei (1878– 1965), Thomas Curran (Chapter 9) shows how even a prominent advocate of vocational education came to realize the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• PART I Modernization and Chinese education: historical perspectives
• PART II Rediscovering China’s cultural roots of education
• PART III Re-envisioning Chinese education as person-making
• Index