Authentic Chinese Educational Thought Selected Works of Li Bingde, Lu Jie, Wang Fengxian and Huang Ji

Group Submission Type: Book Launch

Description of Session

This book brings together four sets of essays by influential Chinese educators of the later 20th century whose ideas had a profound influence over the period since China opened up to the world in the late 1970s. None of them wrote or published in English or other Western languages, so we felt it was important to make these translations available in a time of geo-political tension between China and the Western world, also a time when all educators are trying to respond to the emerging needs of a post-pandemic environment. China’s rich civilizational roots and resources, as well as the energy and innovative thinking that undergirded China’s remarkable economic and social rise may be understood with greater subtlety and nuance after reading these essays, and there may also be significant lessons for the world of the 21st century.
The book starts first with five essays by Professor Li Bingde, the oldest of the educators who lived from 1912 to 2005, and spent the years from 1945 to 1949 in Lausanne and Geneva, also visiting other European countries. The first of the five papers dates back to the 1930s, and demonstrates his open and critical mind at that time, while the others reflect the blossoming of his educational thought from the early 1980s up to 2001, with a paper on Chinese-western cultural exchange presented first at a conference in Toronto in 1992 and then updated for a new publication in 2001.
The book continues with four essays by Professor Lu Jie, the first woman to be appointed a doctoral supervisor in education in the reform period and a scholar who transformed the area of moral education by rooting it in her unique and integrated philosophical understanding of intersections between China’s Confucian traditions, European scholarship such as that of Husserl and Habermas, and an approach to Marxism that showed its profound adaptations to the Chinese context.
Section Three collects three papers by Professor Wang Fengxian, and move from Nanjing in central south China to the Northeast, where he was born in Dalian in 1928, just two years earlier than Lu Jie, and lived out a distinguished educational career at Northeast Normal University in Changchun till his death in 2013, contributing in striking ways to moral education and educational thought.
The book ends with four papers by Professor Huang Ji, an eminent Chinese educational who was born in 1921 in Shandong province in East China. He created the first course on educational philosophy at Beijing Normal University in 1979 and authored A General Introduction of Educational Philosophy in 1982, the first text of its kind in China after 1949 which continues to be widely used in China today.
We hope readers will be rewarded for taking time to familiarise themselves with the educational thought of four of China’s influential educators, all deeply authentic in their reflections on their rich classical heritage and the dramatic changes in education which they contributed to.

Sub Unit

• Pre-Conference Workshops, Book launches, and Visual Art Exhibits / Book Launch

Chair

• Ruth Emilie Scott Hayhoe, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

Discussants

• Zhihui Wu, Northeast Normal University

• 新蓉 郑

• Liyan Lyu, Calvin University

Book Launch Presenters

• Ruth Emilie Scott Hayhoe, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Gerard A Postiglione, Gerard A Postiglione

• Jun Li, Western University

• Julia Pan, OISE - University of Toronto