The Web of Confucius: Evolution and Revolution in Chinese Higher Education by Nancy L. Street and Marilyn J. Matelski is now available from The Learner imprint.
Chinese schools are thought to have begun in the Western Zhou (11th century to 770 B.C.), and continued through Confucius’ time (551-479 B.C., and far beyond), emphasizing the “six arts”-ritual, music, archery, charioteering, history (including calligraphy), and mathematics.
Extrapolating, adapting, and charting these Confucian ideals through several historic eras, the authors use a systems theory-based web model to demonstrate these cultural influences on Chinese higher education. The authors also argue that this “Confucian” web deeply influenced Deng Xiaoping’s “long march” towards China’s global development. Political, financial, technological, social and cultural imperatives of China’s entrance into the global mainstream have, in turn, further affected the escalating evolution of education in China’s universities.
The authors-professors in both the American and the Chinese higher education systems-also develop an argument for delving deeply into culture, utilizing historical-critical methodology, buttressed by a conceptual understanding useful in analyzing the development of similar systems throughout the world. In addition, they present an historic, multi-faceted view of China’s many incursions into the global world system, to build a truly astonishing higher education system in 2009. This rapid response further illustrates the strong foundation and societal and governmental support-upon which the current Chinese educational system continues to build.
The New York Times for 14 November 2009 carried an article by Winnie Hu discussing the increasing trend of teachers offering lesson plans and other classroom material for sale on the World Wide Web.
Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.
While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.
Reviewing the books The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools
by E.D. Hirsch Jr. and Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose in the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco says,
In short, the more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes. The most reliable data, lucidly presented by Daniel Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard, in his book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, do disclose some noteworthy trends. Especially in mathematics, student achievement has lately improved at the elementary school level, but the gains have not been maintained through middle school and high school. Test scores of African-American students in reading as well as in math continue to lag behind those of white students, though the gap has been narrowing. Hispanic students also score lower than non-Hispanic whites, although, as Koretz points out, the meaning of these data is complicated by the fact that “the Hispanic population is constantly refreshed” by new immigrants who, at first, may have difficulty understanding and reading English.[4]
Yet despite the manifest ambiguities of the data, Americans persist in believing that our schools have fallen from some golden age of excellence—an idea that Rothstein dismissed as a “fable.” It was a well-chosen word, since “fable” is the name we give to a tale whose claims cannot be empirically verified but that may nevertheless contain some admonitory or normative truth.
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The Web of Confucius: Evolution and Revolution in Chinese Higher Education by Nancy L. Street and Marilyn J. Matelski is now available from The Learner imprint.
