Chinese Philosophy on Teaching and Learning

Xueji in the Twenty-First Century

Xu Di, Hunter McEwan, Xu Di, Hunter McEwan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781438459707, 9781438459714
• eBook ISBN: 9781438459721
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Written over two and a half millennia ago, the Xueji ( On Teaching and Learning ) is one of the oldest and most comprehensive works on educational philosophy and teaching methods, as well as a consideration of the appropriate roles of teachers and students. The Xueji was included in the Liji ( On Ritual ), one of the Five Classics that became the heart of the educational system during China's imperial era, and it contains the ritual protocols adopted by the Imperial Academy during the Han dynasty. Chinese Philosophy on Teaching and Learning provides a new translation of the Xueji along with essays exploring this work from both Western and Chinese perspectives. Contributors examine the roots of educational thought in classical Chinese philosophy, outline similarities and differences with ideas rooted in classical Greek thought, and explore what the Xueji can offer educators today.

SECTION TWO

ESSAYS

CHAPTER 1

On Teaching and Learning (Xueji 學記)

Setting the Root in Confucian Education

ROGER T. AMES

William James warns us, “We live forwards … but we understand backwards.”1 This same concern led William Faulkner to observe, “There is no such thing as was—only is.”2 The point is that we can never escape anachronism in our thinking. And if all experience is necessarily a collaboration between us and our world and thus always in degree a reflection of our own values and interests, what strategy should we appeal to in our reading of On Teaching and Learning that would allow the document to speak for itself?

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Europeans with a few marginal if not heretical exceptions saw world culture through a biblical lens. They believed with unwavering certainty that the cosmos was only a few thousand years old, that all life on earth including humanity was descended from Noah’s ark, that Christianity is the only true and consummate religion from which all other religions are derived, that human faith and piety continue to play a pivotal role in the larger cosmic order and in its divine history, that the unreason of madness was a freely chosen moral error, and that each one of us has an immortal soul that, at the risk of irrevocable damnation, will one day stand before God in judgment for our deeds done.3 Such being the common sense of the time, any discussion we might pursue today of the prevailing values at the beginning of the nineteenth century requires that we construct an interpretive context as a preemptive strategy for enabling us to take an earlier Europe on its own terms, and for resisting an overwriting of that period with our own, very different assumptions. If this problem of “uncommon assumptions” is a worry so close to home, how much more necessary, then, is the construction of an interpretive context for our contemporary Western reading of the historically antique and culturally remote On Teaching and Learning (xueji 學記) that has been transmitted as one fascicle in the early Chinese classic, On Rites (liji 禮記).

In this essay, I want to begin by accepting the commonplace that personal cultivation is certainly the root of the Confucian philosophy of education. But I also want to observe that any root that has not been properly set and that is lacking a fertile context will soon wither and die. To continue this metaphor, I will argue that Confucian education must be understood as a process that is “radically” embedded in and grows within the roles and relations that constitute us as persons in the fertile context of our families and communities. The close link between education and Confucian morality lie in the fact that they are both grounded in growth in our roles and relations. Education so conceived is not instrumental as a means to some desired end, but is a transformative process that is an end in itself. We are educated to live intelligent lives, and become moral to act morally.

Second, I will carry these themes of situatedness, vital relationality, and growth over to argue for the correlative, yinyang nature of teaching and learning as two mutually implicated and nonanalytic ways of describing the same holistic process of education. Education is holistic learning from which the categories of teaching and learning are simply abstractions. And at the end of the day, the role of teacher provides one the opportunity to be the most advanced among the learners.

And finally I will argue that the value of “family reverence” (xiao 孝) that serves this tradition as its governing moral imperative sets the ultimate goal of Confucian education. The close link between education and social order arises from the fact that the end of education is nothing less than the transformative growth of the people through the intergenerational transmission and embodiment of the living culture. Indeed, education is the internalization of culture that enables the people to transform their ordinary lives and make them extraordinary, and that ideally makes the people self-ordering.

This document On Teaching and Learning as it has been received is a somewhat narrowly focused and formalistic primer on institutionalized education for those teachers and students within a tradition of national academies (daxue 大學) that dates back at least as early as the Shang dynasty (1600–1046 BCE). This state school system was adapted a millennium later as the Imperial Academy (taixue 太學) established in the Western Han dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE) as the first incarnation of a civil service examination system that would persist down to the beginning of the twentieth century. In 124 BCE Emperor Wudi’s Imperial Academy was created to attract and train talented youth for public service with the initially fifty-student enrollment expanding exponentially to include some three thousand students by 50 BC. The academy’s curriculum was based on the Five Classics that in time would be expanded to include other Confucian canons such as the Analects to become the official moral and political ideology of the state, and its graduates would emerge to staff the growing bureaucracy needed to govern the empire. It is reported in the History of the Later Han Dynasty (25–220) that by the second century CE with the pressing demand for an increasingly robust cadre of officials the Imperial Academy had swelled its ranks to more than thirty thousand students.4 From its beginnings to the last days of Chinese imperial history in the early twentieth century, this tradition of Confucian education and effective governance have been perceived as being inextricably linked.

It should not be surprising, then, that this document On Teaching and Learning returns us to our “root” metaphor in describing pedagogy in the state quite literally as the root (ben 本) of proper governance and draws an immediate analogy between the breadth of learning of the discriminating teacher and the reach and influence of the effective ruler:

Exemplary persons (junzi 君子) who can understand the challenges of true scholarship, and who can differentiate virtue from vice, are able to develop broad knowledge and be comprehensive in their teaching. And only by being broad in their knowledge and comprehensive in their instruction can they be true teachers. Only after serving as an experienced teacher can one become a true leader, and only after succeeding as a leader can one become a true ruler.5

On Teaching and Learning states repeatedly that the ultimate goal of education like that of consummate governance has to be “the transformation of the people” (huamin 化民). To this end, the text remembers historically that “the ancient kings in establishing their kingdoms and governing the people took teaching and learning as their prime directive.”6 And it is only through investment in education that the state and its stewards can accomplish the daunting task of achieving and sustaining proper order in the world. In this spirit, the text states explicitly that “if the exemplary ruler really wants to transform the people and refine their way of life, there is no way but through education.”7 Again, those students who have been properly prepared as the highest purveyors of “the way of great learning” (daxuezhidao 大學之道) are described in terms of their capacity to join the ruler in transforming the people and thus in improving the quality of the lives of the people:

By their ninth year of study, having mastered their subjects and applied their knowledge broadly and having established themselves and their goals firmly, then it can be said that students have become greatly accomplished. It is only then that they are able to cultivate and transform the people, and change old human habits and shape new enlightened ways of living. They will be able to bring those close by into harmonious accord and gain the respect of those at a distance.8

How are we to understand this perceived congruency between broad education and effective governance? We might appeal to a parallel chapter in this same classic, On Rites, entitled the Great Learning (daxue 大學), a text that was canonized a second time by Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) in the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279) as the first among the Four Books. Zhu Xi celebrates the Great Learning as a concise and foundational statement of the Confucian project. While On Teaching and Learning is primarily focused on defining the conduct and decorum proper to life within the academy, the Great Learning provides us with deeper insight into what is meant by education itself as a transformative resource for the human experience.

In his commentary on the Book of Rites, Wang Fuzhi 王夫之 (1619–1692) treats these two fascicles—On Teaching and Learning and the Great Learning—as complements, with the former discoursing on reverence for the teacher and respect for the institution of education as the entry point for learning, and the latter expounding on the very vision and substance of learning itself.9 Again, both texts appeal to the notion of “root” (ben 本) as an apposite metaphor for describing the coterminous and mutually entailing process of personal, familial, political, and cosmic growth. That is, within the overwhelmingly agrarian world of ancient China, growth is perceived as a holistic process in which root and tree are dependent upon what is ultimately a cosmic context for their nurturance, and in an analogous way, in which persons, families, polity, and cosmos either grow together, or not at all:

The ancients who sought to demonstrate real excellence to the whole world first brought proper order to their states; in seeking to bring proper order to their states, they first set their families right; in seeking to set their families right, they first cultivated their own persons; in seeking to cultivate their persons, they first knew what is proper in their own heartminds; in seeking to know what is proper in their heartminds, they first became sincere in their purposes; in seeking to become sincere in their purposes, they first became comprehensive in their wisdom. And the highest wisdom lies in seeing how things fit together most productively. Once they saw how things fit together most productively, their wisdom reached its heights; once their wisdom reached its heights, their thoughts were sincere; once their thoughts were sincere, their heartminds knew what is proper; once their heartminds knew what is proper, their persons were cultivated; once their persons were cultivated, their families were set right; once their families were set right, their state was properly ordered; and once their states were properly ordered, there was peace in the world. From the emperor down to the common folk, everything is rooted in personal cultivation. There can be no healthy canopy when the roots are not properly set, and it would never do for priorities to be reversed between what should be invested with importance and what should be treated more lightly. This commitment to personal cultivation is called both the root and the height of wisdom.10

The Great Learning, in emphasizing the holistic, radial, and organic character of education, and in stressing the role of personal cultivation as both the root and ultimate goal of learning, provides much of the broader interpretive context we n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Section One: Translation
• Section Two: Essays
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover