Fast Forward to a Pedagogical Century

Abstract

Generalizations about a “Chinese” and “Western” culture and history often conjure images of an immobilized feudal China and a dynamic capitalist West, doing justice to neither Chinese nor Euro-American history in terms of cultural, ethnic, and geographic diversity. Instead of constructing a comparison of spatially or ethnically grounded cultures, historians should compare different stages of development in different world regions. In fact, studies on American and German educational reform programs have shown that we can link certain pedagogical trends to the emergence of social-economic phenomena such as nationalization, industrialization, and urbanization. In the history of education, transcultural perspectives still tend to focus on inter-European or cross-Atlantic pedagogical exchange. When studies have turned their gaze to the connections between the centers and peripheries of the Euro-American empires this has mostly been part of a postcolonial endeavor to unmask power imbalances and to reinvestigate indigenous agency. Despite similarities and interwoven educational discourses, China, with its Confucian traditions of education and its limited exposure to colonial rule, defies classical comparative and postcolonial approaches. Thus, transcultural perspectives on Chinese education have somehow slipped through the gaps. Furthermore, language barriers and the inaccessibility of sources have impeded new avenues of scholarship. As a result, parallels between the approaches of Chinese, European, and American educators to practical learning often remain unnoticed, especially because of the spatial and temporal disparity of events.