Culture and moral leadership in education

Abstract

I begin by arguing that East Asia is different from the West in many aspects and that the main contributing factor is societal culture. Only recently have scholars in the field of educational administration begun to pay attention to societal culture as a theoretical construct for the analysis of educational theories. The emerging theme of moral leadership that Sergiovanni, Greenfield, and others in the West discuss is consonant with a long intellectual tradition in Chinese culture. The Chinese have a history of both valuing moral leadership and preparing leaders on moral grounds. I examine the early Confucian thought on moral leadership and suggest how the Chinese experience could provide additional examples of how scholars might conceive of moral leadership in modem times.