This book bridges the regions of East Asia and the West by offering a
detailed and critical inquiry of educational concepts of the East Asian
tradition. It provides educational thinkers and practitioners with
alternative resources and perspectives for their educational thinking,
to enrich their educational languages and to promote the recognition of
educational thoughts from different cultures and traditions across a
global world.
The key notions of Confucian and Neo-Confucian philosophy directly
concern the ideals, processes and challenges of learning, education and
self-transformation, which can be seen as the western equivalences of
liberal education, including the German concept of Bildung. All the
topics in the book are of fundamental interest across diverse cultures,
giving a voice to a set of long-lasting and yet differentiated cultural
traditions of learning and education, and thereby creating a common
space for critical philosophical reflection of one's own educational
tradition and practice.
The book is especially timely, given that the vocabularies in
educational discourse today have been dominantly "West centred" for a
long time, even while the whole world has become more and more diverse
across races, religions and cultures. It offers a great opportunity to
philosophers of education for their cross-cultural understanding and
self-understanding of educational ideas and practices on both personal
and institutional levels.