I've just been reading a fascinating book recommended to me by our librarian: Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West (2012) by Jin Li, Associate Professor of Education and Human Development at Brown University.
The book really stirred me up (as a good book should); below is the email I sent to my librarian. I feel very pretentious making such broad statements in response to such a well-researched and argued book, but I also feel my response is an important one. In the school where I teach, the need to account appropriately for differing cultural perspectives on learning is incredibly important, not just because we want to teach our students well, but also because the ethos of the school is grounded in a belief that we must respect diverse cultures and explore what it means to make a better world for all cultures.
Here are my thoughts:
I found the ideas and arguments fascinating and - for me as a Western reader - very useful as I learn more about teaching students from an Eastern cultural background.
The problem for me is that the book grounds its explanations entirely in ancient philosophy and has nothing to say about modern sociology. The influences on modern Western education stop, according to Jin Li, with Kant. There is no discussion of Max Weber and the idea of the Protestant Work Ethic, for example, and little discussion of the impact of the 200 years since the Industrial Revolution. The general argument about a difference between East and West in education is convincing but grounding the causes predominantly in ancient philosophy leads to the potential to miss the impact of industrialisation on education. In the West, industrialisation has been a 200 year process which has had a dramatic impact on society, family and education (which has been famously slow to catch up). In China, this same process has happened largely in one life-time. Families and culture are different in the East and West as much because of a variation in the modern history of the countries (including the repression of industrialisation in the East as a result of Western colonisation). I would contend that if you compared education in the East and West 200 years ago, the similarities would be much more striking (even given that Jin Li's differences would still be noticeable and important).
Why I think my framing of the differences is important is that Jin Li's account suggests that cultural differences are central, axiomatic and immutable. If, as I am suggesting, the differences are as much grounded in a differing rate of acceleration through the processes of transition from agrarian to post-industrial economies, then we would expect that education practices in Eastern society are likely to change. As teachers, supporting that change isn't disrespectful to the cultural traditions of the East, it is important to preparing all our students for the world of the future.
Cheers,
Ian
