The History of the West–East Encounter and the Failure of Modern Chinese Education

• In Event: 46.029 - State Policy and the Education of the Masses: International Perspectives

Abstract

This historical investigation and analysis attempts to understand the conditions and the dynamics of the modern formation and transformation of Chinese education, in the context of China’s encounter with the West, and the struggles it has been through. The paper traces the changing concept of the person modern Chinese education is to produce in order to transform China’s national culture and identity. I will argue that modern Chinese education has failed its purpose because in rejecting its own cultural roots and embracing a “pseudo-Western version of modernity” (Current, 2005, p. 426), a meaningful east-west civilizational synthesis, particularly in the philosophical understanding of what is to be a person and how education can be a process of person-making, failed to emerge.

Author

• Guoping Zhao, Oklahoma State University