Confucianism, modernization and Chinese pedagogy: An introduction

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I want to express my deep gratitude to Ian Westbury who initiated this symposium and has provided immense support and guidance throughout the entire process. The symposium would not have been possible without his invaluable contribution. Special thanks also go to Yuzhen Xu, Benjamin Wong, and Yanping Fang who have contributed to the symposium in various ways. Notes 1. In addition, Spring (2006 Spring, J. 2006. Pedagogies of Globalization: The Rise of the Educational Security State, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [Google Scholar]) argued that the ‘industrial-consumer’ model has triumphed over the ‘progressive’ tradition which is concerned with empowering students to reconstruct the society. 2. Confucianism was initially a complete ideological system created by Confucius (551–479 BCE). It had evolved and transformed over the history. In the Sung dynasty (979–1279) a new form of Confucianism, neo-Confucianism, was developed, which was a creative reinterpretation of the traditional Confucian core to address the socio-economic problems of the day and the challenges posed by Buddhism and Taoism (Lee 2000 Lee, T. H. C. 2000. Education in Traditional China: A History, Leiden, , The Netherland: Brill. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). New Confucianism was another version of Confucian philosophy formed through a creative interpretation of past Confucian heritages with the aid of Western and non-Confucian ideas, as a response to Western modernity (Tan 2008 Tan, S. H. 2008. “Modernising Confucianism and New Confucianism”. In The Cambridge Companion to Modern Chinese Culture, Edited by: Louie, K. 135–154. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 3. The Confucian classics include Book of Poetry, Book of History, Book of Change, Book of Ri, and Spring and Autumn Annals. 4. However, Makeham (2008 Makeham, J. 2008. Lost Soul: ‘Confucianism’ in Contemporary Chinese Academic Discourse, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Centre. [Google Scholar]) argued that the Confucian revival was primarily an intellectual movement in which academia employed Neo-Confucian philosophy of the 10th–17th centuries to address contemporary issues facing China.