Confucian Perspectives On Learning And Self Transformation

This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking, to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a global world. The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures, giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational tradition and practice. The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in educational discourse today have been dominantly “West centred” for a long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal and institutional levels.

Confucian Thought: Selfhood as Creative Transformation is a collection of Tu's seminal essays. It is a sustained deliberation on the substance and worth of the Confucian conception of personhood. This analysis complements Tu's highly acclaimed Humanity and Self-Cultivation: Essays in Confucian Thought as a continued expression of his deepening understanding of Confucianism voiced through various perennial human concerns. Tu weaves philosophic, historical, anthropological, sociological, and psychological perspectives into a coherent discussion of the Confucian themes that continue to inspire the modern intellectual mind. His is a vital contribution to Chinese thought and religion.

Educational philosophies of self-cultivation as the cultural foundation and philosophical ethos for education have strong and historically effective traditions stretching back to antiquity in the classical ‘cradle’ civilizations of China and East Asia, India and Pakistan, Greece and Anatolia, focused on the cultural traditions in Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism in the East and Hellenistic philosophy in the West. This volume in East-West dialogues in philosophy of education examines both Confucian and Western classical traditions revealing that although each provides its own distinct figure of the virtuous person, they are remarkably similar in their conception and emphasis on moral self-cultivation as a practical answer to how humans become virtuous. The collection also examines self-cultivation in Japanese traditions and also the nature of Michel Foucault’s work in relation to ethical and aesthetic ideals of Hellenistic self-cultivation.

What does the Confucian heritage mean to modern East Asian education today? Is it invalid and outdated, or an irreplaceable cultural resource for an alternative approach to education? And to what extent can we recover the humanistic elements of the Confucian tradition of education for use in world education? Written from a comparative perspective, this book attempts to collectively explore these pivotal questions in search of future directions in education. In East Asian countries like China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Confucianism as a philosophy of learning is still deeply embedded in the ways people think of and practice education in their everyday life, even if their official language puts on the Western scientific mode. It discusses how Confucian concepts including rite, rote-learning and conformity to authority can be differently understood for the post-liberal and post-metaphysical culture of education today. The contributors seek to make sense of East Asian experiences of modern education, and to find a way to make Confucian philosophy of education compatible with the Western idea of liberal education. This book was originally published as a special issue of Educational Philosophy and Theory.

This volume explores the deeply interwoven connection of education, art and nature in the context of East Asia. With contributions from authors in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, the book considers unnoticed but significant themes involved in the interplay of nature, art, and education. It manifests how nature and art can educate, and how education and nature play the role of art. The chapters explore a range of themes relevant to East Asian characteristics, including skill acquisition, Japanese calendar arts and ritual of feelings, garden architecture, the ritualised body, collaborative poetry art, translational language between humans and nature, the Confucian classical Six Arts, the artistic embodiment of the Kyoto School, and the heritage art based education in Korea. The authors examine these themes in novel ways to bring to light the relevance of the East Asian insights to the contemporary global world. This book is an outstanding resource to all researchers, scholars, and students interested in educational aesthetics, philosophy of education, East Asian studies, comparative education and intercultural education.

Explores the rich potential of Confucianism in American and Chinese classrooms of the twenty-first century. This is one of the first books to explicitly address twenty-first-century education from a Confucian perspective. The contributors focus on why Confucianism is relevant to both American and Chinese education, how Confucian pedagogical principles can be applied to diverse sociocultural settings, and what the social and moral functions of a Confucianism-based education are. Prominent scholars explore a wide-range of research areas and methods, such as K–12 and college teaching; conceptual comparisons; case studies; and discourse analysis, that reflect the depth and breadth of Confucian ideas, and the divergent contexts in which Confucian principles and practices may be applied. This book not only enriches the research literature on Confucianism from an interdisciplinary perspective, but also offers fresh insights into Confucianism’s continuing relevance and its compatibility with the latest research-based pedagogical practices. Xiufeng Liu is Director of the Center for Educational Innovation and Professor of Learning and Instruction at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. He is the author of several books, including Linking Competence to Opportunities to Learn: Models of Competence and Data Mining. Wen Ma is Associate Professor of Education at Le Moyne College. He is the editor of East Meets West in Teacher Preparation: Crossing Chinese and American Borders and the coeditor (with Guofang Li) of Chinese-Heritage Students in North American Schools: Understanding Hearts and Minds Beyond Test Scores.

This book explicitly unites the concepts of higher education and love to examine how these concepts are mutually compatible. As the world of higher education moves towards the metrics of value, and the worth of knowledge becomes more valued in its use rather than its discovery, a crisis brews. If higher education is to contribute to the wellbeing of the self and of others, then the institution needs to be radically reviewed to see if, and how, love contributes to higher education within and beyond its walls. This book addresses the core question of what would the university might be like, today and into the future, if the timeless notion of love was the basis of its educative process, notwithstanding the material artefacts the university helps to create, but also as a way of framing approaches to higher education.

Persons Emerging explores the renewed idea of the Confucian person in the eleventh-century philosophies of Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, and Zhang Zai. Galia Patt-Shamir discusses their responses to the Confucian challenge that the Way, as perfection, can be broadened by the person who travels it. Suggesting that the three neo-Confucian philosophers undertake the classical Confucian task of "broadening the way," each proposes to deal with it from a different angle: Zhou Dunyi offers a metaphysical emerging out of the infinitude-finitude boundary, Shao Yong emerges out of the epistemological boundary between in and out, and Zhang Zai offers a pragmatic emerging out of the boundary between life and death. Through the lens of these three Song-period China philosophers, the idea of "transcending self-boundaries" places neo-Confucian philosophies within the global philosophical context. Patt-Shamir questions the Confucian notions of person, Way, and how they relate to human flourishing to highlight how the emergence of personhood demands transcending metaphysical, epistemological, and moral self-boundaries.