5DOI: 10.4312/as.2017.5.2.5-8
Editor’s Foreword: Confucianism and Education
Jana S. ROŠKER∗ 1
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 glo-
balized 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 auton-
omous 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 fenc-
es 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 wide-spread 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 ab-
solute 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 re-
ciprocal responsibility. Moreover, while the autocratic model of hierarchy, by which 
∗ Jana S. ROŠKER, Professor, Department of Asian Studies,  
Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. 
 jana.rosker[at]ff.uni-lj.si
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6 Jana S. Rošker: Editor’s Foreword
the ruler’s authority was absolute and their responsibility towards their subordinates 
reduced to a mere formalism or symbolism, has undeniably held sway in Chinese 
history, we must also bear in mind that Confucianism in its role as the state doctrine 
represented the interests of the ruling class, and as such was defined by legalistic 
elements that are not found in original Confucianism. We must not forget that 
hierarchic structures are also present in Western democratic systems, and most im-
portantly, authority based on experience, knowledge and abilities is not necessarily a 
negative ideal, or a threat to individual autonomy. 
The Confucian classics stress the important role of ideational and axiological el-
ements, like rituality, relational ethics, the virtues of humaneness and justice, and 
the crucial role of education as a basic means of cultivating and thus improv-
ing (inborn) humaneness in order to achieve progress and social development. 
While they also lay stress on the so-called “Six Arts”—ritual, music, archery, 
chariot-riding, calligraphy, and computation—it is clear that the Confucian clas-
sics see morality as the most important subject. Confucian didactic methods are 
rather remarkable. Like Confucius, a Confucian teacher never lectures at length 
on a subject. Instead, he or she poses questions, quotes passages from the classical 
works, or applies fitting analogies, and then waits for the students to find the right 
answers “independently”––by themselves.
According to the Analects, Confucius pointed out that thinking without learning 
is blind, and learning without thinking dangerous. Besides, he also asserted that 
attacking the views of others is harmful. This tolerance is based on a notion of 
moral autonomy, which is typical for the Confucian ideal personality, and implicit 
in most of the Confucian discourses. As such, promoting education is one of the 
most important Confucian values, and it is better to educate one’s children than 
to give them wealth. However, education is not only the wealth of a person, but 
also that of the cultures and societies he or she lives within. It is the most valu-
able inheritance we can give future generations. Moreover, in today’s globalized 
world, in which different traditions can interact and learn from each other, this 
kind of inheritance can be exchanged, combined, synthesized and thus enriched. 
Therefore, this special issue wishes to present different approaches to achieving 
and preserving this, in the West, at least, hidden treasure. It also aims to raise 
awareness regarding a particular, culturally and historically conditioned model of 
institutions, didactic structures and axiological priorities, which differs profoundly 
from traditional Euro-American educational models. 
This special issue is structured around three broad themes. The first is linked to 
the Contemporary Implications of Confucian Education, and includes two contribu-
tions, written by Kirill O. Thompson and Jana S. Rošker, respectively. It opens with 
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7Asian Studies V (XXI), 2 (2017), pp. 5–8
Thompson’s article, entitled “Lessons from Zhu Xi’s Views on Inquiry and Learn-
ing for Contemporary Advanced Humanities Education and Research”. This paper 
deals with important questions regarding the crisis of contemporary humanities, 
the sense, purpose and function of which seem to be gradually getting lost in our 
globalized world. Because of widescale social transitions, which inevitably also in-
fluence education at all levels, formal schooling is increasingly often reduced to just 
the training of efficient professional experts, without considering that every society 
also needs responsible, thoughtful and cultivated people. As a meaningful alterna-
tive, the author introduces Zhu Xi’s model of “advanced learning”, which is com-
parable to the contemporary college education and not only provides students with 
the necessary factual knowledge about society and the world, but also cultivates 
them in order to develop their sensibility, logic and abilities of autonomous judge-
ment. The author shows that Zhu Xi’s educational theories imply the importance 
of such cultivation, which is a necessary and elementary part of every sensitive, re-
sponsible, reflective and self-aware human being. Jana S. Rošker, the author of the 
second article on this broad theme, writes about “Contemporary Confucianism as 
a Form of East Asian Social Knowledge”, and likewise grounds her contribution 
in the problematic global tendencies seen in contemporary education. Proceeding 
from the notion of Confucianism as a form of social knowledge in East Asia, she 
aims to explain why and how the Modern Confucian emphasis on the traditional 
Confucian link between comprehension and the ethical evaluation of being is of 
great importance for a gradual restoration of the “credibility” of ancient Chinese 
thought in the context of modern social knowledge.
The second theme, entitled Body and Mind, proceeds from the introduction of the 
corporeal aspects of Confucian teachings, through the tacit knowledge implied in 
their explicit and implicit epistemological methods, and then directly to its linkages 
to ideologies. It opens with Margus Ott’s article “Confucius’ Embodied Knowl-
edge”. In this the author argues that the modern embodiment theory could help 
us to understand some critical aspects of Confucianism and the Confucian theory 
of knowledge, and vice versa. Through a systematic analysis of classical sources, Ott 
shows that––in contrast to Western ideational history––China in general and Con-
fucianism in particular has a very long tradition of embodied knowledge and em-
bodied cognition. David Bartosch’s paper, “Explicit and Implicit Aspects of Confu-
cian Education”, investigates Confucian methods of manifest and latent knowledge 
in order to identify possible approaches for their adaptation, modernization and 
their fruitful synthesis with modern educational science. The last paper in this set 
was written by Selusi Ambrogio, and deals with another kind of latent knowledge, 
investigating the process of (often hidden) forms of ideologically guided misuse of 
Confucian teachings, and the related teachings of moral education in contemporary 
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8 Jana S. Rošker: Editor’s Foreword
China. This article is entitled “Moral Education and Ideology: The Revival of Con-
fucian Values and the Harmonious Shaping of the New Chinese Man”.
The last theme of this special issue deals with Confucian education in the broader 
geopolitical context of Eastern and South-East Asia, and thus in different regions 
belonging to the area that was historically influenced by Confucian teachings. As 
such, its title is Broader Perspectives, and it contains three contributions. The first two 
were written by Marko Ogrizek and Kristina Hmeljak Sangawa. They both explore 
certain transformations and the fate of Confucian teachings in pre-modern Japan. 
Ogrizek’s article, “Following the Way of the Ancient Kings: The Concept of ‘Learn-
ing’ in the Teachings of Ogyū Sorai”, introduces Sorai’s concept of learning, which 
is based on studying “the Way of the ancient Kings”. Since Ogyū Sorai is among 
the most famous and influential Japanese Confucian philosophers of the Edo pe-
riod, his teachings had wide ranging implications both for the educational and the 
political system of pre-modern Japan. In order to gain an insight into the ethical 
and political consequences of Sorai’s interpretations, the author demonstrates how 
and why he was basing his interpretation of value and meaning, as prescribed by 
the ancient sages, chiefly on the reverence of the unknowable, and his concept of 
following the Way mainly on faith in the sages. Kristina Hmeljak-Sangawa’s paper 
also deals with the problem of Confucian teachings and education in pre-modern 
Japan, although from quite a different perspective. In her article entitled “Confucian 
Learning and Literacy in Japan’s Schools of the Edo Period”, she investigates the 
social functions and implications of Chinese Confucian teachings that were written 
in the kanbun style, on the development of the Japanese educational system and 
strategies of literacy. Last, but not least, we have to introduce the article “A Viet-
namese Reading of the Master’s Classic: Pha. m Nguyeễn Du’s Humble Comments on 
the Analects as an Example of Transformative Learning”, which was written by the 
Vietnamese scholar Nam Nguyen. It offers a remarkable insight into an area, which 
is still widely unknown in Western scholarship, namely the Vietnamese reception 
and re-interpretation of Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucianism. 
We hope that this diverse issue, which illuminates Confucian teachings and views 
on education from several different perspectives, will help readers to obtain a bet-
ter understanding of this important element of ancient and traditional East Asian 
cultural heritage. It is an especially valuable heritage, which can––inter alia––en-
able us to understand that education is much more than a few years of training in 
professional expertise. It is a lifelong process, because learning to be truly human 
is a never-ending project. 
Jana S. Rošker, Chief editor
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