The Useless Tree

More on Teaching Confucianism in China

Another busy week in the classroom here.  I want to respond to a couple of comments from my last post (I close comments after one week because of spam attacks) about my experience teaching Confucianism here now.

First up, J asks: "Have you considered asking your students in what ways is "Confucianism" in contemporary China similar to the various Confucianisms of the past?"

We have considered differences in what Confucianism can be now, anywhere, and what it was in ancient China.

One of the things I made sure to do was read several passages in The Analects that devalue women, especially 17.25: "The Master said, Women and small men are difficult to nurture. If you get too close to them, they become uncompliant, and if you stay too distant, they become resentful.(Enos translation - pdf).  A large majority of my class, about 23 out of 30, are young Chinese women.  I assume that they have some sense that Confucianism was used historically to dominate women, the May 4th critique, and I want to meet that head on. One has told me personally that she is a feminist and I'm sure others hold similar views. I used the word "misogynist," which was new to them in English.

I then went on to argue that for Confucianism to be viable in modern contexts, it must abandon its traditional tie to patriarchalism.  Neville brings this up in the opening of Boston Confucianism.  They tend to be rather quiet but I imagine some of them will agree with this, while others might just want to reject the idea that Confucianism should be revived and used as any sort of moral standard now.  I brought Chenyang Li's article,  "The Confucian Concept of Jen and Feminist Care Ethics: A Comparative Study," (pdf) into the conversation.  They seem fascinated that such things are argued about in English by serious academic philosophers.  The world of Chinese philosophy in the West is largely new to them, and it is still difficult to comprehend linguistically and intellectually. I'm giving them a lot to think about and I hope they continue to contemplate it after this short course is over.

Another question comes from blog-friend Bill Haines, asking about how students conceive of "individualism" and what might be its opposite in their minds.

This is a big topic, one that the students are reading about now.  I have assigned them two articles for Monday: Erica Brindley, "Moral Autonomy and Individual Sources of Authority in The Analects;" and Joseph Chan, "Moral Autonomy, Civil Liberties, and Confucianism."  I'm interested in how Confucianism might adapt to a liberal cultural context (I'm using "liberal" in a broad sense, recognizing its political and economic aspects but also framing it in cultural terms).  Most of them have only a rudimentary understanding of the concept (remember most have only just completed their first year in college and come from a wide varieties of majors).  Brindley and Chan will, I hope, get them thinking more deeply about what individual autonomy is and how it might not be as alien to Confucianism as they might think. 

On Wednesday I lectured for an hour and a half on liberalism, in both its classical and modern forms.  Whe I asked how many had ever heard of John Locke, only about five raised their hands. But one of those five came up after class to say that, in one of his other classes, they are discussion liberalism, and we talked about the comparison of John Rawls and Mencius.

For the most part, however, student comments tend to repeat a rather facile distinction of "West=individualism" v. "China=collectivism".  I push against this in various ways.  And some of them are very much aware that China now is far from any sort of ideal collectivism.  I don't think they have thought much about what the opposite of "individualism" might be, especially in China now, which is overrun by individualization.  That's the most interesting thing about being here now: society and culture are undergoing such rapid and destabilizing change, it's hard to pin down just what "Chinese" v. 'the West" might mean anymore.  It's cultural hybridity everywhere.

In writing their papers about what they understand to be the most significant concept in The Analects, several argued that "humanity" (ren) and "ritual" (li) were key and could offer something positive and constructive for the social dislocations of ultra-individualist America.  But some suggested that those same concepts might be helpful in similar ways in China now.  And I should say one of the most intriguing papers argued that the most significant concept in The Analects is "forgiveness."  It's not one of the standard Confucian virtues, but I think the student is on to something: the kind of self-cultivation that we might find in Confucius requires both forgiveness of ourselves when we err, and a forgiveness of others in the name of progress toward humanity.

 I will report back on what they make of Brindley and Chan.

Teaching Confucius in Beijing

I've been here over a week and have hardly had time to even think about blogging. It turns out that getting my class, "Confucianism in America," up and running has been a lot more time-consuming than I realized.  The central challenge is adapting my methods and expectations to this particular context. 

My students, all Chinese, are bright and hard working. Their English is good.  But almost all of them are undergraduates; only one graduate student.  Indeed,  26 of the 30 students have just finished their first year in college. Some of the readings I had originally selected would be difficult for junior and senior American students operating in their first language.  So, I had to scramble to cut back on some readings and find some new ones so as not to overwhelm them. 

Another challenge is the time intensity.  I teach double sessions, 8:00-9:30, 10:00-11:30  on Monday and Wednesday mornings.  I've never done such schedule and I did not really think it through.  I've had to rethink readings and topics and class room time in light of this. I think I have it worked out now.

This week we read English translations of The Analects and Mencius.  The students are obviously familiar with these thinkers.  They have read selections from these texts.  But most of them have not read the texts in their entirety, have not worked with the ideas in English, nor thought systematically about how ideas from these texts might relate to other philosophic or political concepts (universality, deontolgy, consequentialism, legitimate authority, etc.).  We spent three hours on each text, reading passages, talking about them.  I went in with a list of ideas to work on, but on neither day did I get through them all. As is the case with all my teaching I followed along where their questions and comments pointed.  We ranged about, hit upon some interesting comparisons, and generally had a good time.

I'm not sure what they think of it yet. Some are very engaged, eyes bright, reacting to my attempts at humor, asking good questions, making apt points. Others seem a bit detached, processing perhaps, and trying to figure out just what I am saying and doing.  It could seem a bit strange: a foreigner talking to them about how their ancient culture is understood (they might think misunderstood) by Americans. Is an "American Confucianism" still Confucianism?

I have instituted "question time" at the start of class, when they can ask me any question at all about America.  Today a young woman asked: why would Americans ever be interested in Confucianism, since the strong tradition and culture  of individualism in the US seems so contrary to the more collectivist ethic of Confucianism?  Great question. I responded (and I'm still thinking about this) that even though individualism is deeply rooted in American identity, it is all that there is to that identity.  Notions of "public service" and "civic mindedness" (Tocqueville comes to mind...) and a willingness to volunteer to help others with no expectation of personal reward are also important parts of the story.

On Monday, another asked if Americans still held to the "American Dream."  I imagine that the question was prompted by the current rhetoric here on the "China Dream."  But I told her that, for the most part, we don't talk much or explicitly about the "American Dream" these days. It was more a symbol of the early post-WWII era.  The 1960s injected a more critical element into the national discourse. Maybe I'm wrong about that (this piece, which I found after class, suggests otherwise), but I don't really think about it myself. The world seems so differnent now than the 1950s, the possibilities for mobility narrowed and transformed by globalization.

What's starting to happen is that they are making me think about my culture and society as I make them think about an element of their ancient culture in a new context. For them it is a question of whether Confucianism in America is still Confucianism; for me it's a question of whether Confucianim in America can be American.  We'll probably meet somewhere in the middle.

It's going to be a great July!

Confucius Statue on Renda campus

Confucian Learning, or not

David Brooks has a piece in the NYT today, discussing a new book by Jin Li, Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West.  Let me say right up front that I have not read the book (though I look forward to learning from it). I am simply reacting to Brooks' interpretation of it.  And that interpretation raises a number of questions.

Let's start with this paragraph:

The simplest way to summarize her findings is that Westerners tend to define learning cognitively while Asians tend to define it morally. Westerners tend to see learning as something people do in order to understand and master the external world. Asians tend to see learning as an arduous process they undertake in order to cultivate virtues inside the self.

Perhaps this is an overly simplistic summary; I imagine Li has a somewhat more sophisticated analysis (as suggested in this NPR discussion). The first problem here is the Western/cognitive versus Asian/moral distinction.  To begin with, these are rather obviously massive abstractions.  What is "West"? What is "Asian"?  These categories, to my mind, are simply too big to be of much real analytic utility.  In any event, is it true that "Westerners" are more focused on cognitive learning while "Asians" define learning morally? When? Now?

It is certainly true that Confucian classics - The Analects and Mencius - emphasize moral learning.  Analects 16.9 gets this on the table:

Confucius said, Those born with understanding rank highest. Those who study and gain understanding come next. Those who face difficulties and yet study - they are next.  Those who face difficulties but never study - they are the lowest type of people. (Watson)

孔子曰：「生而知之者，上也；學而知之者，次也；困而學之，又其次也；困而不學，民斯為下矣。」

 "Understanding" (zhi - 知) here denotes a knowledge of proper ethical conduct, something like wisdom, or, as Hall and Ames (52-53) have it "performative wisdom".  Some people just instinctually know the right thing to do in virtually any circumstance. Most of us have to study to learn what is, and how to do, the right thing.  And some avoid that kind of normative engagement and those are morally deficient. Confucian learning is all about morality.

Of course, Confucius and Mencius are not the only Chinese philosophers to write about understanding (zhi - 知).  There is a treatement of it, made by Mohists and Xunzi, that is more empirical ("cognitive" in Brooks' use above), based on our perceptual experience of the world external to us.  We can't really delve too deeply into this point here, but we should keep in mind the range and diversity of ancient Chinese thought.

But let's assume that Confucian learning is, generally, an exercise in the development of one's moral discernment and that understanding is predominant in traditional Chinese culture.  Two questions follow:

- Does that emphasis on morality distinguish "Asian" learning from "Western" learning?

- Does the ancient Chinese sensibility obtain in contemporary Chinese society?

I think the answers to those two questions could well be "no".

On the first point, classical "Western" learning was, and is, geared toward a kind of moral development of the individual.  Socrates tells us to "Know thyself," and works to  live a good life. Here is Pierre Hadot (90):

Thus, the Socratic dialogue turns out to be a kind of communal spiritual exercise.  In it, the interlocutors are invited to participate in such inner spiritual exercises as examinations of conscience and attention to oneself; in other words, they are urged to comply with the famous dictum, "Know Thyself."

Classical "Western" learning is, in short, a kind of moral learning, not radically different from the Confucian ideal.  It could be argued, of course, that that classical tradition has been lost, overwhelmed by the tide of scientific, rationalist empiricism that takes us away from normative concerns.  And that is true, to a degree.  Much of the learning that takes place in American colleges is technical and not explicitly normative (even though all knowledge may be normative in one way or another), designed to facilitate the accession to a career or profession.  But the ideal lives on, and can still be realized to a degree, in the liberal arts project.  Here is the opening of the "Mission Statement" of my college:

Williams seeks to provide the finest possible liberal arts education by nurturing in students the academic and civic virtues, and their related traits of character. Academic virtues include the capacities to explore widely and deeply, think critically, reason empirically, express clearly, and connect ideas creatively. Civic virtues include commitment to engage both the broad public realm and community life, and the skills to do so effectively. These virtues, in turn, have associated traits of character. For example, free inquiry requires open-mindedness, and commitment to community draws on concern for others.

Notice: "traits of character" and "civic virtues."  Now it can be argued that we might not live up to those goals, but it is clear that the institution publicly declares a mission that is explicitly normative in a manner that resonates with not only the ancient Greeks but also, I would hold, classical Confucians as well.

So, are we "Asian"?  Perhaps we are, and, from my point of view, that is just fine.  But we are also "Western" because that other sort of "cognitive" learning also goes on here. So we are both. But, then, what is the distinction, really?

It gets more complicated because when we look at learning in China today the "Asian/moral" versus "Western/cognitive" distinction just doesn't hold up, either. And we need go no further than The Onion to get a sense of this: "Report: Chinese Third-Graders Falling Behind U.S. High School Students in Math, Science".  We know that, if globally standardized tests, like the PISA exam, are measures of cognitive learning, and I think they are, then many Chinese students are incredibly good at this.  My sense is that the extreme competitiveness of comtemporary Chinese society creates very powerful incentives for "cognitive learning." Students there work incredibly hard to master standardized test taking. The stakes are high, and the winners in that system, some of whom wind up in my classes, are extraordinarily good "cognitive" learners.  Are they thus "Western"?

At a certain level of abstraction the distinction is essentially useless.  Because The "West" is not as "Western" as Brooks' simplistic summary implies, nor is "Asian" as Asian. And contermporary China is not a Confucian society in the classical sense.

One last thing.  Brooks writes:

Li argues that Westerners emphasize the Aha moment of sudden insight, while Chinese are more likely to emphasize the arduous accumulation of understanding. American high school students tease nerds, while there is no such concept in the Chinese vocabulary. Western schools want students to be proud of their achievements, while the Chinese emphasize that humility enables self-examination. Western students often work harder after you praise them, while Asian students sometimes work harder after you criticize them.

It may be true - and, again, I want to emphasize that I have not read Prof. Li's book and I am sure there are valuable things to learn from her work - that hard work and struggle are culturally valued more highly in Chinese school environments (that is an empirical question I will leave to others to debate), but it is also true, as suggested in Analects 16.9 above, that Confucius recognized that some people have a stronger innate moral sense and thus can know what best to do without need of study.  The sage-emperor Shun, discussed in Mencius is a model of this sort of person.  He just got it.  He worked hard to maintain his filiality in the face of a depraved father, but, in the first instance, he was just naturally good.  Some people don't have to work as hard at moral learning as others.

Maybe, in the end, we should avoid overly general characterizations of "Western" and "Asian."

 picture credit

Education is a Dialogue

Just want to give a quick shout out to Mark Edmunson for his op-ed in yesterday's NYT: "The Trouble with Online Education."  With all the recent foofaraw recently about on-line courses and MOOCs, various people at various places (most notably the idiot Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia) are fretting about the end of colleges, and especially liberal arts colleges, as we know them.  I don't share these concerns.  Of course, there are serious problems with higher education in the US, and the rise of on-line courses does pose a certain challenge.  But, at the end of the day, there will always be a place for education via direct human contact between teachers and students.

Edmunson gets this rather clearly:

Online education is a one-size-fits-all endeavor. It tends to be a monologue and not a real dialogue. The Internet teacher, even one who responds to students via e-mail, can never have the immediacy of contact that the teacher on the scene can, with his sensitivity to unspoken moods and enthusiasms. This is particularly true of online courses for which the lectures are already filmed and in the can. It doesn’t matter who is sitting out there on the Internet watching; the course is what it is.

He goes on to mention an ancient Greek thinker - "Learning at its best is a collective enterprise, something we’ve known since Socrates." - a fairly standard move.  We could add to that Confucius, who similarly believed in the necessity of direct interaction in education.  Here's this from The Analects:

The Master said: "Out walking with two companions, I'm sure to be in my teacher's company. The good in one I adopt in myself; the bad in the other I change in myself. (7.22)

子曰：「三人行，必有我師焉。擇其善者而從之，其不善者而改之。」

We learn best when in interaction with others, not we we sit, solitary and passive, gazing at a screen.  And a certain passion and commitment is also necessary (which I will admist is often lacking in the 18-22 year old cohort):

The Master said: "Study as if you'll never know enough, as if you're afraid of losing it all. (8.17)

子曰：「學如不及，猶恐失之。」

That passion might be carried over to online learning.  But I still think Edmunson is right when he argues:

...You can get knowledge from an Internet course if you’re highly motivated to learn. But in real courses the students and teachers come together and create an immediate and vital community of learning. A real course creates intellectual joy, at least in some. I don’t think an Internet course ever will. Internet learning promises to make intellectual life more sterile and abstract than it already is — and also, for teachers and for students alike, far more lonely.

The ideal of the university, of which the liberal arts college is a miniaturization, arose in medieval times, and it has survived the horrors of war, the deprivations of economic depression, and the transformations of culture.  But yet it persists.  I think we're still safe for a while.... 

A Shout Out to the Dazhai Boyz

One pleasant result of my trip to Dazhai, Yunnan, last week was meeting the Teach for China fellows there. River and Richard and Tom and Gareth, a nice crew:

It seems that Tom and Gareth blog about their experiences, and some of their stories are quite revealing of life in a rural Chinese middle school.

One post by Gareth is especially moving:

I'm writing this post with a particularly heavy heart. Forgive me if this post seems too emotional or is difficult to read, but blogging seems as good an outlet as any to channel sorrow. Yesterday, I learned of an awful tragedy. I have a student whose father recently passed away. His name is Jake. Jake is a quiet boy who doesn't do so well in school, but tries hard and is rarely naughty. He hasn't been at school much for the last couple of weeks and I just learned the reason; his family is coping with this tremendous loss. The circumstances of Jake's father's death are not very pleasant, but bear telling because we're talking about one of my students--whom I'm collectively beginning to love just as I hope to love my own children someday--and the challenges that he is facing during these difficult weeks, and will continue to face for the rest of his life, when his family calls upon him to provide for them in ways that his father will never be able to again, now that he, just 12 years old, is the only "man" left in his household....

Read the whole thing...

Tom's writing tends to the lighter side; here's an amusing story of a love note:

My kids love writing notes, and some are nicer than others. I never understood how my teacher knew I was up to no good, but now I know it's probably because I had an undeniable look of "I'm doing something wrong" on my face. I know that look very well now because of my students....

Love and death and everything in between: that's what these guys are living in Dazhai.  Check out their blogs:

This is China

糟糕

Their kids are great:

Answering the Gaokao with the Daodejing and Zhuangzi

The big national college entrance exam - the dreaded gaokao - has just finished in China.  Danwei has a collection of some of the various essay questions posed in different provinces.  As I read through them I thought that one, at least, could be readily answered with a reference to the Daodejing and Zhuangzi.  This question, from Jiangxi:

Recovering childhood (找回童年) — "Why do we want to recover childhood? Because society it too utilitarian, children have too much pressure, and childhood ends too early. Society needs innocence and required a return to childhood."

A Daoist-inspired response would start by agreeing that society is too utilitarian - and that is a bad thing; it takes us away from Dao (Way), the natural unfolding of things.  And, yes, childhood ends to early.  But a Daoist would push further and argue that a return to childhood is necessary because it is the youngest, infants especially, who have not yet been contaminated with the expectations and desires and understandings that obstruct our apprehension of, and adherence to, Dao.  We learn to close ourselves off from the spontaneous expression of nature - ziran.  We come to believe that we can meaningfully control our lives and fates.  It is not just that society needs innocence, but that each of us is, as Zhuangzi says, hurtling toward oblivion:

Once we happen into the form of this body, we cannot forget it.  And so it is that we wait out the end.  Grappling and tangling with things, we rush headlong toward the end, and there’s no stopping it.  It’s sad, isn’t it? We slave our lives away and never get anywhere, work ourselves ragged and never find our way home.  How could it be anything but sorrow?  People can talk about never dying, but what good is that?  This form we have soon becomes others, and the mind vanishes with it.  How could it be called anything but great sorrow?  Life is total confusion.  Or is it that I’m the only one who’s confused? (20)

We need to return to childhood because of what "childhood" stands for: the unadulterated human experience, without guile or goals, free from societal standards or strictures.  And that liberating possibility (I have always thought Zhuangzi was very much about liberation) is captured in section 55 of the Daodejing (Lau translation):

One who possesses virtue in abundance is comparable to a new born babe:
Poisonous insects will not sting it;
Ferocious animals will not pounce on it;
Predatory birds will not swoop down on it.
Its bones are weak and its sinews supple yet its hold is firm.
It does not know the union of male and female yet its male member will stir:
This is because its virility is at its height.

It howls all day yet does not become hoarse: This is because its harmony is at its height. To know harmony is called the constant;
To know the constant is called discernment.
To try to add to one's vitality is called ill-omened;
For the mind to egg on the breath is called violent.

A creature in its prime doing harm to the old
Is known as going against the way.
That which goes against the way will come to an early end.

I have to believe that some students in Jiangxi invoked these passages...

Embracing the Useless

It's that time of year again. College and high school graduations come around and people start to wonder: "what use is all of this education?"  The question is especially piquant for the newly unemployed college graduates, the English majors who can't find a job, the Philosophy majors returning home to their parents, perhaps even the Political Science majors...

Rebecca Mead has a nice little piece in this week's "Talk of the Town" in The New Yorker, "Learning by Degrees," where she pushes back a bit against the pessimism surrounding liberal arts.  These paragraphs, in particular, caught my eye:

...Given the high cost of attending college in the United States, the question of whether a student is getting his or her money’s worth tends to loom large with whoever is paying the tuition fees and the meal-plan bills. Even so, one needn’t necessarily be a liberal-arts graduate to regard as distinctly and speciously utilitarian the idea that higher education is, above all, a route to economic advancement. Unaddressed in that calculus is any question of what else an education might be for: to nurture critical thought; to expose individuals to the signal accomplishments of humankind; to develop in them an ability not just to listen actively but to respond intelligently.

All these are habits of mind that are useful for an engaged citizenry, and from which a letter carrier, no less than a college professor, might derive a sense of self-worth. For who’s to say in what direction a letter carrier’s thoughts might, or should, turn, regardless of the job’s demands? Consider Stephen Law, a professor of philosophy at the University of London, who started his working life delivering mail for the British postal service, began reading works of philosophy in his spare time, decided that he’d like to know more, and went on to study the discipline at City University, in London, and at Oxford University. (A philosophy graduate in the Class of 2010, by the way, stands to earn an average starting salary of forty thousand dollars a year, rising to a lifetime median of seventy-six thousand. Not exactly statistician money, but something to think about.) Indeed, if even a professionally oriented college degree is no longer a guarantee of easily found employment, an argument might be made in favor of a student’s pursuing an education that is less, rather than more, pragmatic. (More theology, less accounting.) That way, regardless of each graduate’s ultimate path, all might be qualified to be carriers of arts and letters, of which the nation can never have too many.

Mead is, inadvertently I assume, invoking an argument from Zhuangzi: that which appears to be useless actually has a certain utility.  In a post last year, "Uselessness: Now more than ever!" I explicate this Zhuangzi argument, as well as two others in defense of uselessness.  Perhaps mail carriers now play the part of Cook Ting in Zhuangzi, doing a job that appears to be simple and undemanding but which proves to be a means of gaining a greater appreciation of Way (Tao). 

And while I'm at it: congratulations graduates!  Whether you have a job or not....

The Limits of Confucian Revival in China

On Saturday the WaPo (hat tip CDT) ran a conventional restatement of the Confucian revival in China story.  Not much new reported beyond the usual observations that people, including businessmen, are embracing revised Confucian rituals.  Yet when this story is juxtaposed against a recent post at ChinaGeeks, "Education without Heart," (with another hat tip to CDT!) we can see just how limited the Confucian revival really is.   

But before I get to the ChinaGeeks translation, let me nitpick the WaPo piece.

First these is this graf:

But a Confucian revival sanctioned and initially steered by the party has grown into something more vibrant and also more unpredictable. It has become a quest for alternative ideas that challenge not only foreign imports such as democracy but also some of the homegrown results of China's dash to modernity.

My gripe has to do with that "initially steered," which makes the revival seem like it is the brain child of CCP apparatchiks.  This is unfortunate, since it is more accurate to say that Confucianism began to revive in the PRC in the 1980s largely due to the efforts of intellectuals both outside and inside China.  As John Markham makes clear in his magisterial book, Lost Soul, political authorities had little to do with return of Confucianism after the Cultural Revolution.  US-based academics Tu Wei-ming and Yu Yingshi were key players.  Now it is true that the Party has found something useful in the Confucian revival, and that certain Party leaders have made public gestures of support.  But "initially" the Party had little to do with it.

Substantively, I have to call out this passage:

"If Confucius were alive today, he would probably join the Communist Party," said the institute's deputy director, Kong Xianglin, a 75th-generation descendant of Confucius and a party member for 30 years.

He said Confucianism will never supplant China's official state creed of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" but can complement and reinforce it. Confucius, said Kong, citing an oft-repeated maxim, "believed in 'harmonious while different.' "

I think this is incorrect.  If Confucius were alive today, and if he wanted to be a Party member (and I doubt he would since it has generally transformed into a means for material advancement, not the cultivation of Humanity), he would likely be rejected or expelled.   Confucius and Menicus would be too critical to be accepted in the Party.  They would not sit silently by as the horrendous errors of the past, especially the deadly Great Leap Forward, are quietly forgotten.  They would certainly protest as honest, noble-minded people, like Wan Yanhai, are harassed and hounded from the country.  They would not be interested in using their public office for private gain, as so many Party cadres do.

But let's get to the larger question of the limits of the Confucian revival.  ChinaGeeks translates an article from Southern Weekend (original Chinese here).  The author, Yu Jian, laments the hyper-intrumentalism and lack of empathy characteristic of high school education in China today:

Teaching for the final test seems to have become education’s primary duty.

From what I understand, all grade three Chinese senior high school students have already finished their normal studies for the year and entered into vigorous preparation to battle the Gaokao exam. Now, all schools only have one class: how to handle the Gaokao. Parents closely cooperate, and the study of unrelated subjects such as poetry, music, dance, art, philosophy, aesthetics and ethics have resolutely come to an end, as if the sky had collapsed in on them. In other words, the skill of test taking has become education’s highest knowledge, the only knowledge [worth having].

Yu invokes Confucius briefly:

When the great Confucius said that we should “teach students according to their individual abilities”, he certainly did not mean that we should teach only from some textbook for some test, he meant that we should identify and cultivate each student’s individual and unique genius[….]

We could go further.  Education, for Confucius, was fundamentally moral education.  The purpose of learning was understanding how to enact Duty according to Ritual to move toward Humanity in one's life.   Education was not a means to power and/or wealth; it was a process of cultivating and expanding upon one's innate ethical sensibilities.  While it is true that Confucius hoped that the virtuous and wise would rule, and thereby come to have a kind of privileged position in society.  But it was also true that Confucius did not make that possible outcome the explicit goal of education.  Indeed, the morally educated person should accept poverty if that is what the moral life required:

The Master said: “The noble-minded devote themselves to Way, not to earning a living.  A farmer may go hungry, and a scholar may stumble into a good salary.  So it is that the noble-minded worry about the Way, not poverty and hunger.”  (15.32) 

The Master said: “Poor food and water for dinner, a bent arm for a pillow – that is where joy resides.  For me, wealth and renown without honor are nothing but drifting clouds.” (7.16)

In other words, it hardly matters that a few Chinese businessmen put on some "traditional" outfits and bow down before a statue of The Sage.  If the Chinese education system is producing graduates who focus on the pursuit of individual interest (or "profit" in a general sense), then the soil for the growth of "Confucianism" will be rocky and shallow and inhospitable for many years to come.

 

(illustration from Yu Jian's article; caption reads: "score + grades = character").

Confucius and Education Reform in Korea

I had a very pleasant dinner Saturday night: tasty Korean food with friends.  The main chef of the evening was a young woman who is interested in reforming higher education in South Korea.  We talked a bit and that conversation has inspired these thoughts here...

She pointed out that, generally, South Korean higher education is overwhelmed by a very powerful instrumentalism: students compete fiercely to get into the best schools and this creates not only an "exam hell," but also a privileging of rote learning and practical knowledge.  Creativity, innovation, and knowledge (and perhaps even beauty) simply for its own sake (i.e. without reference to practical application) are all subverted in the obsessive rush to excel at standardized tests.  Much of this happens before students get into college, but the same sort of narrow utilitarianism infuses higher education generally.  While there are efforts to develop a broader possibility of liberal arts education (see for example Korea University's College of Liberal Arts), my friend, a Korean who graduated from a US liberal arts college, suggested that much more could be done to cultivate a more open-minded, free-thinking, critical and creative approach to the humanities and social sciences.

And as one who has championed uselessness, I am completely sympathetic to her analysis.

Oddly enough I also believe that an answer to this problem can be found in Confucianism.

I know that Confucianism is often pegged as a key part of the educational instrumentalism in East Asia.  The argument goes something like this: because of the rigid and rigorous examination system in imperial China and Korea (Tokugawa Japan was different), a general culture of rote memorization arose and that has carried over into the modern era. This culture runs deep into family life: parents will sacrifice much and push their children to succeed educationally.  And the limitations that this imposes on creative and critical thinking are exacerbated by the extraordinarily competitive pressures of large populations struggling for scarce opportunities in a global economy.  

But all of that gets Confucian education wrong.  It is true that Confucianism was appropriated by state managers, as early as the Han dynasty, and infused with Legalist principles to serve as a legitimating political ideology.  And that the examination system was the key institution for reproducing state structures and ideology.  Confucius himself, however, did not have such a strictly instrumentalist vision of education.   For him, education was all about moral development.  We have to learn, and teach, how to rightly apprehend what Duty means in particular social contexts and how Ritual is best expressed in specific moments if we are to progress toward Humanity.  There are many ways in which the sensibilities of Humanity can be instilled.  In his times, he and his immediate followers (i.e. before the Qin dynasty) encouraged a curriculum that included:  ritual, music, archery, chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation.  Arts, sciences, athletics - sounds rather like a liberal arts ideal. 

Technical and professional training were less important to him than a broader humanistic awareness:

The Master said: "Devote yourself to the Way, depend on Integrity, rely on Humanity, and wander in the arts." 7.6

Way, for a Confucian, is the organic totality of human relations and how they are embedded in broader natural and cosmological dynamics.  Integrity is the understanding and practice of moral goodness, knowing and doing the right thing.  And Humanity is the highest achievement of ethical conduct, it is what we all strive to be.  Analects 7.6 ends with a reference to the arts, which, to me, suggests that art - in all of its various forms - helps us cultivate the kind of moral virtuosity required of Humanity.  

None of this is about competition and standardized exams.  Indeed, Confucius disdained competition of any sort:

The Master said: "The noble-minded never contend.  It's true that archery is a kind of contention.  But even then, they bow and yield to each other when stepping up to the range.  And when they step down, they toast each other.  Even in contention, they retain their nobility. 3.7

And asking questions is central to Confucian pedagogy, however much our image of East Asian classrooms is one of the authoritative teacher giving forth correct knowledge to unquestioning students:

When he was in the Grand Temple, the Master asked questions about everything he saw.  Someone said: "Who says the son of a Tsou villager understands Ritual?  When he was in the Grand Temple, he asked questions about everything he saw."

When he heard this, the Master said: "That questioning is itself Ritual." 3.15

Asking questions is proper behavior, especially for someone in a setting that naturally elicits questioning.  Not every circumstance calls forth questioning, but in educational settings it would seem that questions are an effective teaching tool.

I could go on.  But suffice it to say the strictly systematized and standardized, rote-memory educational system that now often bears the name "Confucian" is not at all in keeping with the educational ideas of Confucius.  And those original Confucian ideas could be relevant to educational reform in Korea and other parts of the world.

Learning Nationalism

In my class on East Asian nationalism were are reading the introduction and afterword of Liah Greenfeld's book, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity.  It is quite different from the Gellner book I mentioned in posts below.  She is much more subjective in her analysis, as opposed to Gellner's vaunted objectivity.

This passage from Greenfeld jumped out at me:

The cardinal fact of human existence is that humans lack built-in "models for" behavior in groups.  Social integration and cooperation are necessary for the preservation of the human species (as well as for its individual members), but there is no innate knowledge of how this should be accomplished.  The lack of innate knowledge results in the need for models and blueprints, for an image of order, or created symbolic order, among human beings. (18)

For her, national identity becomes one of those "created symbolic orders," and a particularly powerful one under conditions of modernity.  (Quite to the contrary of Gellner, she argues that nationalism produces modernization, not the other way around).

That passage, and that sensibility, brought Mencius immediately to mind:

“Hou Chi taught the ways of agriculture to the people, taught them how to plant the five grains.  And when the five grains ripened, the people were well fed.  But once people have plenty of food and warm clothes, they lead idle lives.  This is their Way.  Then, unless they’re taught, they’re hardly different from the birds and animals.  The sage-emperor worried about this.  He made Hsieh minister of education so the people would be taught about the bonds of human community: affection between father and son, Duty between sovereign and subject, responsibility between husband and wife, proper station between young and old, sincerity between friend and friend.”  (5.4)

后稷教民稼穡。樹藝五穀，五穀熟而民人育。人之有道也，飽食、煖衣、逸居而無教，則近於禽獸。聖人有憂之，使契為司徒，教以人倫：父子有親，君臣有義，夫婦有別，長幼有序，朋友有信.

Mencius, of course, famously asserts that all human beings have an innately good human nature.  But that innate goodness must be cultivated and developed.  We must be taught, and constantly continue to teach ourselves, how to be good.  We require the "created symbolic order" of Ritual and Duty to establish and live through the "bonds of human community."

I suspect Mencius would reject the limitation of this project to nationalism, which is too parochial in its vision.  Rather, he would see this as a more universal, transnational endeavor....