Thinking About Love, Justice, and Education Through Confucianism, Taoism, Love’s Knowledge, and Narrative Imagination: Confucius, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Weiming Tu, Maxine Greene, and Martha Nussbaum

• In Event: Separation of School and (Corporate) State? Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Love, Justice, and Education

Abstract

Ming Fang He will share her cross-cultural perspectives on Love, Justice, and Education (Schubert, 2009a) drawing upon the notion of embodied humanism (Tu, 2010) from Eastern thoughts such as Confucianism (Confucius), Daoism (Laozi; Zhuangzi), and Buddhism. She will focus on Confucius’s idea of considering “ren (benevolence, humanity, or righteousness) as the center of the cosmos, harmoniously interconnected... To be ren is to become humane. To become humane, one needs to be educated. To become educated, one needs to cultivate the self to achieve integrity, ritual propriety, wisdom, loyalty, filial piety, and trust within the family, community, and state to realize the grand unity of the world, where peace prevails, order abounds, harmony sustains, and the individual thrives in communions” (He, 2013, p. 62). She will share propriety and ethics in Daoism which emphasize wu-wei (action through non-action), "naturalness" of evolving yin-yang, simplicity, spontaneity, compassion, moderation, and humility, and those in Buddhism that by destroying greed, hatred, and delusion, which are the causes of all suffering, humans can attain enlightenment. She also draws upon a wide array of Western thoughts such as radical narrative imagination (e.g., Greene, 1995; Nussbaum, 1997, 2010; 2010 Bauman & Tester, 2001; Giroux, 2007; Olson & Worsham, 2007), love’s knowledge (Nussbaum, 2000), radical possibilities (Anyon, 2005), freedom dreams (Freire, 2007, organized and presented by Anan Maria Araújo Freire; Kelley, 2002; Schubert, 2009a), Black protest thought (Watkins, 2005), radical love (King, 1963/1981; Schubert, 2009a), sociological imagination (Mills, 1959/2000), dialogic imagination (Bakhtin, 1981), spaces of hope (Harvey, 2000), geography of human life and theory of value creating pedagogy (Makiguchi, 1871-1944; Bethel, 1989, 2002), and curriculum imagination (Lake, 2013). Ming Fang He calls embodied humanism as “the common heritage of humanity” (UNESCO, 2009) that should become the epistemological foundation for curriculum theorizing that addresses pressing issues and contemporary concerns and makes impact on practice, policy, and historical, social, political, economic, geographical, cultural, linguistic, and ecological contexts. This common heritage of humanity thrives with voluntary exile (He, 2010) from the commodified (Illich, 1970; Reynolds & Webber, 2009), acquisitive (Schubert, 2009a), and deskilling (Apple, 1986) places and spaces; cultivates radical imagination (e.g., Anyon, 2005; Freire, 2007; Giroux, 2007; Greene, 1995; Olson & Worsham, 2007) that “exercising an optimism of the intellect in order to open up ways of thinking” (Harvey, 2000, p. 6); educates hope (Giroux, 2007) that opens up horizons of comparison by evoking not just different histories, but also different futures…it substantiates the importance of ambivalence while problematizing certainty” (Giroux, 2007, p. xiii); politicizes possibilities (Olson & Worsham, 2007) without romanticizing or cynicizing the world where we live; and demands unfaltering commitment to cultivating the highest human potential for creative, harmonious, associated, joyful, and worthwhile living (Schubert, 2009b) for all in an increasingly diversified, complicated, and contested world (He, 2010).

Author

• Ming Fang He, Georgia Southern University