Editor's Foreword: Confucianism and Education (original) (raw)

Since Immanuel Kant's seminal essay " What is Enlightenment? " , independent, autonomous and critical thinking has stood at the forefront of any " progressive " (and even any reasonable) theory of education. In today's neo-liberal and globalized world, the common trend of making everything a marketable commodity has also affected this, notwithstanding the fact that the ability to establish one's critical and independent judgement remains the very basis of becoming an autonomous individual, and represents a central pillar of democracy. As such, critical thinking has become a product that can be bought, sold or even stolen––just like its traditional breeding ground, namely institutionalized education. It may thus be time to mourn the loss of the critical mind, and so mark the sad end of a certain kind of education, one which gave a key place to the humanities. However, instead of grieving for such losses and memorializing the end of the European subject, who has obviously lost his free will in the whirlwind of the all-embracing market economy, and sadly died in front of the barbed-wire fences defending his homeland from thousands of unarmed, weakened, starving and freezing refugees, we are searching for alternatives. As such, we present in this issue another kind of education. Admittedly, the values Confucian education aimed to foster did not include much absolute independence, but it still laid emphasis on autonomous critical thinking and genuine humaneness. While many believe that Confucianism is incompatible with the critical mind and personal autonomy, this issue aims to show that this widespread prejudice is rooted in a lack of knowledge. The most common image of Confucianism is that it was advocating a strict, rigid and hierarchically structured society based on the absolute obedience of those at the subordinate levels of the system, and, analogously, on absolute power of their superiors. However, we would like to present another picture of Confucian education, one that is more academically justified and closer to the truth. It is important to recall that this model was originally, and especially in the classical Confucian teachings, rooted in the principles of complementarity and reciprocal responsibility.