Education policy borrowing and cultural scripts for teaching in China

Abstract

China's recent education reforms are a result of selective policy borrowing from ‘the West’. Although comparativists have highlighted the importance of cultural context in policy borrowing in China, what remains relatively under-explored is the epistemological basis for cultural views that mediate policy transfer. This article argues that the dominant cultural factors (‘cultural scripts’) for teaching in China – students' respect for the teacher, student attention and discipline in class, and the importance of practice – find their genesis and justification in a Confucian worldview. Focussing on a Chinese classic text, Xueji (Record of Learning), this article elucidates the ancient Chinese views on the nature and transmission of knowledge and explains why the ‘teacher-dominated’ pedagogy is believed by many Chinese educators to be indispensable for ‘good’ teaching. An appreciation of the epistemological foundation of culture, it is argued, is salutary in enhancing our understanding of policy divergence across societies despite their apparent convergence of global/‘Western’ educational ideas and practices.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Yang Liuxin, Hunter McEwan, Xu Di and Roger Ames for the permission to cite from their manuscript, and the reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Notes on contributor

Charlene Tan is an associate professor at the National Institute of Education of the Nanyang Technological University. A philosopher by training, she is the author of Learning from Shanghai: Lessons on Achieving Educational Success (Springer) and Confucius (Bloomsbury). She is currently completing a book manuscript on the educational philosophy and policy in China (Routledge).

Notes

1. Gardner was referring specifically to the Four Books, namely Analects (Lunyu), Mencius (Mengzi), Great Learning (Daxue), and Doctrine of the Mean (Zhongyong) in the quotation cited in this article. But his comments about the enduring influences of Confucian from the Four Books teachings on the lives of the Chinese would also apply to other Confucian classic texts.

2. I have translated Xueji as ‘Record of Learning’ as it is the most literal translation. However, other scholars have translated it variously as ‘Record on the Subject of Education’ (Legge 1885), ‘Record of Learning’ (Wong 1976) and ‘On Teaching and Learning’ (Yang et al. 2012), etc. Whichever translation one chooses, the agreement among scholars is that the text focuses on both learning and teaching.

3. I follow Legge (1885) and Gao (2006) in dividing the text into 22 sections. However, others such as Wong (1976) and Yang et al. (2012) divide it into 21 sections while Chen (2004) divides it into 20 sections.

4. Some readers may wonder whether it is appropriate to use modern specialised educational terms such as ‘college’, ‘curriculum' and ‘syllabus' to describe ancient Chinese education. On the one hand, I agree that we should use terms such as ‘syllabus' and ‘curriculum’ cautiously when discussing the Xueji since the educational system in the classic text is not identical to modern schooling as we know today. On the other hand, it should be pointed out that a system that was a precursor of modern school system had already existed during the latter years of the Warring States period or the Han dynasty, which was the period in which the Xueji was written. A careful reading of the Xueji reveals that the educational landscape at that time was one where there were already different types of schools (see IV where ‘village school’, ‘county school’ and ‘college’ were mentioned), different levels of students (see V where ‘first-year students', ‘third-year students', ‘ninth year of study', etc were mentioned), assessment (see V), curriculum where music, poetry and the arts were mentioned (see VII).