Rebuilding the Chinese Soul: Some Considerations for Education

Abstract

This paper tackles the issue of education as the process of person-making and attempts to redefine the ideal and unique Chinese person—the Chinese soul—based on a civilizational dialogue and synthesis that would transform modern education and enable education to play a central role in “redeeming modernity” and revitalizing Chinese civilization. The paper briefly analyzes the historical efforts, and failures, to reform the Chinese soul and argues that the 150-year effort to revitalize Chinese culture and transform the Chinese people by way of adopting certain aspects of Western civilization has mostly failed because a sufficiently coherent and meaningful synthesis of the two civilizations was lacking.