Feeling lost between tradition and modernity: In pursuit of the reinvention of East-Asian subjectivities

Abstract

This short essay makes a comment on the special issue on Japanese scholars’ responses to modern education in Japan edited by Morimichi Kato. The essay mainly focuses on the historical experiences shared by most of east Asian countries, the establishment of modern education of which tended to be historically forced by the external superpower: the experiences of feeling split between tradition and modernity. From the post-colonial perspective, the essay poses a challenging question of how the east Asian educators are to purse a way of overcoming the split and reinventing their own subjectivities without falling into cultural essentialism or western universalism.

Keywords:

• Self-split in the dialect of modernity
• cultural essentialism
• east-Asian subjectivities
• post-colonial perspective
• two moves in ‘Asia as method’

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Duck-Joo Kwak

Duck-Joo Kwak is a professor at the Department of Education, Seoul National University in Seoul, Korea. Her research interests are: philosophy of arts education, philosophy of teacher education, and comparative studies in the humanistic traditions of education between the East and West. Email: [email protected]