MCLC: No room for western values in university education (12)

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No room for western values in university education (12)
I found Sean Macdonald’s critical self-awareness refreshing and reinvigorating. The issue here should not be whether or not Western values ought to have room in Chinese universities but how not to valorize ideas in the name of a culture order or power. I translated Teacher Cai’s talk because it shows, among other things, how widely spread “Western” ideas are in China. In this day and age where cultures become increasingly interdependent and ideas flow freely through trade and telecommunication, it’s foolish to try to establish cultural boundaries and to essentialize what is or isn’t Chinese. It took courage to criticize the current education system in China the way Cai did, carrying on the cultural revolution that began over a century ago when the civil service exam was abolished. What Cai wants for China is a liberal arts education but the way he proselytizes it does sound self-righteous, didactic and radical, like Lu Xun who tried to indict Confucian tradition as a form of cannibalism or Susan Sontag who believed that white race is the cancer of human history. Confucian culture is not all garbage and a liberal education is no panacea for the world.
rujie wang <rwang at wooster.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on February 12, 2015
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