Guoping Zhao

In this paper, I will argue that the current crisis of democracy is a crisis
of liberal democracy and that both the right and the left populist movements have contributed to its crisis. Acknowledging sustained attack on liberal and
democratic values from the far right, I will pay particular attention to how justice-oriented education efforts, especially those focusing on race, gender, and sexual diversity, have contributed to the erosion of liberal democratic values. Using the current DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives in educational settings as an example, I will analyze how liberal values have been shifted and questioned and how our concerns for social justice and inequality have led to imposition of new ideas and policies that are in need of serious deliberation.

In this paper, I review three theorists—Nel Noddings, Emmanuel Levinas, and Michael Slote—from the feminist, continental, and analytical philosophical traditions and their respective ethical theories developed against the dominant Western approach. While Noddings and Levinas attempt to reconfigure a notion of the relational self in seeking new ethical ground, Slote attempts a virtue theory that does not challenge the fundamental beliefs and assumptions of the Western tradition. I discuss how these theorists understand the root cause of the problems of the Enlightenment legacy and their respective approaches and justifications in addressing the problems. I conclude that while a shared interest in and valuing of receptivity is apparent in all theories, they also bear profound differences and exhibit different merits.

Biesta has suggested that education after humanism should be interested in existence, not
essence, in what the subject can do, not in what the subject is—the truth about the subject—and
this is the way inspired by Foucault and Levinas. In this article, I analyze Foucault’s alleged
deconstruction and reconfiguration of the subject and Levinas’ approach to human subjectivity
and suggest that Foucault’s early and later works have already implied certain concepts of the
subject and that Levinas’ approach to human subjectivity does not, as has often been perceived
in educational circles, avoid theorizing about human subjectivity. Drawing on the French
philosophy of difference, particularly Levinas’ ideas of alterity and subjectivity, I propose a
post-humanist subject as a singular existence that ‘announces, promises, and at the same time
conceals’, that cannot be exhausted, totalized, and replicated. The singular and unique subject,
open and responsible to the world and beyond, is indispensible to the educational mission of
subjectification.

In education, art has often been perceived as entertainment and decoration and is the first subject to go when there are budget cuts or test score pressures. Drawing on Lévinas’ idea of the primacy of radical alterity that breaks the totality of our being, enables self-transformation and ethics, and ensures community as a totality of singularities, and on Blanchot’s expansion of radical alterity to art, I argue that the role of art in education must be reconsidered and greatly expanded. Art-as-alterity takes students beyond where they are and what they have, and teaches them to appreciate and respect difference and diversity. If art-as-alterity is so essential to human subjectivity and society, and if education is conceived “as a process of human growth and formation,”  art-as-alterity is essential to education and needs to be more seriously engaged and more fully integrated into the whole educational process, instead of being cornered in arts education.  With such a reconsideration of art-as-alterity in education, I ponder its pedagogical implications.

This paper analyzes the entanglement of the modern concept of freedom, autonomy, and the modern notion of the subject and how a passion for and insistence on freedom has undermined the reconstruction of human subjectivity in Heidegger and Foucault, and how such passion has also limited the educational effort at addressing the problems brought to education by the modern subject. Drawing on Levinas, it suggests that a new understanding of freedom as heteronomy will allow us to envision an open subjectivity that is essential for education. Particularly, it looks at Gert Biesta’s recent campaigns for “subjectification” and “the gift of teaching” to analyze the underlying contradictions caused by the entanglement of freedom and subjectivity.

Lévinas’ claim of ethics as the first philosophy has been compared to the Confucian project. While the similarity between Lévinas and the Confucians in their central concern for ethics is apparent, I argue in this essay that the Daoists may have a deeper resonance with Lévinas. With the inspiration of Lévinas’ insights into sense and meaning, I investigate how Lévinas’ subjectivity and the Daoist, particular the Zhuangzian, notion of the non-being self draw on the same primordial experiential base which has given rise to an understanding of our self that leads to an embodied transcendence. In the context of battling the modern Western autonomous and egoistic self that has caused much damage in modern history, I explore whether an appreciation of the pre-ego, pre-reflective experiences upon which Lévinas and Zhuangzi build their subjectivity and non-being self can lead us to ethics and spirituality, with a new understanding of human freedom that is radically different from the modern notion of freedom as autonomy.

The examination of the modern construction of subject is not over yet. Although many thinkers have exhausted its conceptual ambiguities and practical consequences, its impact is far from fully understood without an analysis of the construction of childhood for the future subject. In this essay I problematize five constructions of childhood that emerged in the modern time and scrutinize the impasses of logic or conceptual ambiguities within, along with the practical consequences thereof. I explore how the modern construction of childhood is problematic in and of itself, as well as the light it sheds on the deeply embedded ambiguities and aporia (Wagner 1994; Zhao 2007) in the construction of the modern subject. This paper will untangle the problems associated with each of these constructs and their respective implications for the making of the modern subject.

The Western transcendental tradition has come under serious attack in recent decades. In this article, I argue that, in fact, there was a shift in Western history when a more disconnected form of transcendence replaced the Greco-Roman connected form of transcendence. While the disconnected form of transcendence has helped generate notions such as individual rights, freedom, and dignity, it has also removed the construction of man from a commitment to the existential experiences of humanity and therefore leaves room for the potential estrangement of men. Rather than calling the Chinese notion of transcendence “imminent” or “inward” transcendence, I suggest that the term “connected transcendence” may be more helpful in comparing and contrasting the Chinese and the modern Western notions of transcendence and their different constructions and treatments of man. In the Chinese context, lacking an absolute point of reference, the actual treatment of men is at risk of being swayed by human flaws. However, leaving nothing set in stone and forever tuning to human consciousness and deeply felt human sentiments, the Confucian construction of men contains a remarkable ability to recognize and struggle against harmful interpretations and practices which may or may not originate from Confucian roots.

The current educational discourse on Levinas’ subjectivity has focused on the pure openness and subjection of the self to the other. Based on such understanding, some educational theorists hold that Levinas has given us new hope for the mission of education, while others deny its relevance. I suggest that this interpretation of Levinas has missed the complete structure of his account of subjectivity, therefore, a full appreciation of its potential for education is yet to be realized. With a different account of Levinas’ subjectivity, I join Biesta and Todd in seeing Levinas as essentially important in providing new inspiration, a new way out of both the humanist trap of a fixed essence, where education inevitably becomes socialization, and the post-humanist impasse, where education loses its ground and its orientation. Levinas’ subjectivity has made it possible for us to forge a pedagogy that is different from socialization and interruption—a pedagogy of becoming—and allows a genuine educational mission of subjectification, albeit towards a new, much different subjectivity.

The construction of the modern subject and the pursuit of human freedom and autonomy, as well as the practice of human science, has been pivotal in the development of modern education. But for Foucault, the subject is only the effect of discourses and power-knowledge arrangements, and modern human science is part of the very arrangement that has given birth to the subject who is thoroughly subjected. In his final years, however, a strong passion for human liberty re-emerged, and he proposed that a different truth game, the ancient ethical truth practices may actually constitute a self that is free and enjoys self-mastery. In this article, I will analyze how modern human science, exemplified by Piaget’s child developmental research, has become the means of unfreedom and domination and discuss the ancient ethical truth games Foucault so admired and how they bring self-mastery and freedom to the self. Further, I will discuss whether liberal education can ground its notions of autonomy and liberty on the Foucauldian concept of the subject and truth games.

Foucault and Zhuangzi share important insights into the role knowledge practices play in the pursuit of human freedom. This paper investigates Foucault’s discussion of the subjectivation truth games of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and in light of the discussion, reconsiders Zhuangzi’s approach to knowledge practices. It also examines the notion of self and freedom embedded in the knowledge practices of Foucault and Zhuangzi and suggests that, when trying to get away from the metaphysical subject, there is an inherent problem associated with Foucault’s embrace of the Western notion of freedom as autonomy. The author suggests that Zhuangzi’s notion of freedom as breaking beyond our limits and entering into the larger whole and his notion of a non-being self may make the human pursuit of freedom more successful.

This paper explores, through the lens of childhood, the Chinese cultural dynamics that encourage harmonious human relationships at the price of individual development and yet support a deep appreciation of natural human experiences that allows room for the development of individuality. The purpose of such investigation is to reexamine our cultural heritage in regard to the ways we conceptualize human beings and treat them, retracing its promises, difficulties, pitfalls, and spiritual resources, and thus to help reconfigure a new individuality for education.

The postmodern critique of modernity has focused on the construction of the modern subject and the self-disciplining and self-cancellation tendencies within it. This critique, however, fails to consider what happens during the early years of children’s development — the period during which the modern subject is made, and the one in which the paradoxes and ambiguities inherent in modern subjectivity are established. In this essay Guoping Zhao analyzes how children’s developmental process affects the definition and formation of the self in the United States. She uses a cross-cultural lens, comparing the dominant cultural ideas and practices associated with child development in the United States (stemming from the ideology of liberal individualism) with those influenced and supported by Confucianism. Zhao argues that children’s paths of development are not natural but cultural ones guided by underlying ideologies, and ultimately concludes that this cultural process determines the shapes and forms of the modern subject and the nature of individual freedom and autonomy.

This paper critically examines contemporary American classroom discourses and tries to understand the effects of the larger social and cultural meanings that have penetrated the discourses. The central question of this article is why the seemingly justified, admirable, and inspiring ideas of child-centeredness and democratic education often result in poor educational outcomes. I suggest that the unique American construction of the self has helped generate the type of classroom practices that render the educational outcomes inconsistent with their intent.

In this article, I trace historical events and thoughts that have joined forces in creating American cultural ways of “thinking about human beings and acting upon them.” I suggest that, while Foucault, Rose, and Popkewitz’s work has demonstrated crucial parallels between the emergence of a new liberalism and a new way of governance—governing the soul—the American solution differs significantly from that of Europe. Rather than monitoring, oppressing, or regulating the inner state of the individual, the American approach is to construct and act upon an idealized self that fits well into the current political and social order.

This article examines how the denotation of the term ‘identity’ has been transformed as a result of a fundamental change that has occurred to our conceptualization of humanity. Identity has become a dual-meaninged word that conveys both the traditional sense of enduring self and the modern sense of social locations. This dual-meaningness has confounded our understanding of students from diverse backgrounds by confining them within their social/cultural/racial locations. The author contends that the current discourse of identity in social science is at the heart of the difficulties of immigrant and minority students’ school experience and performance.

Guoping Zhao Subjectivity and Infinity Time and Existence Turns to the Heideggerian tradition to take on the task of a phenomenological investigation of the temporal constitution of being Pays particular attention to unrecognized experiences that constitute subjectivity Proposes a subjectivity that may lead to creative and diverse ways of living This book formulates a new theory of subjectivity in the context of the claimed "death of the subject" in the post-modern and post-human age. The new theory is developed against the conception of the subject as a transcendental ego whose constitutive roles, recognition, and representation lead to theobjectivization and totalization of the world and denial of its inner infinity and heterogeneity. Critically scrutinizing ideas from Bergson, James, Husserl, Heidegger, Derrida,Zen Buddhism, and Chinese Zhuangzi, and through an analysis of time and temporality, this book advances a number of new concepts, including "primal sensibility" and "pure experience," and proposes aporous structure of subjectivity with an ex-egological and ex-subjective zone that allowsnothingness and absence to ground presence.Such atheory of subjectivity provides the basis for an understanding of thinking as imagination and self-identity as narrative presentation in the intersubjective world.

Chinese education has been increasingly attracting attention all over the world. Over the last three decades, China has made greater and more rapid strides in universalizing the provision of basic education than any other country. Education has been seen as the “secret” of China’s economic miracle. Recently, the remarkable performance of Shanghai students in the 4th Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) has led to the belief that the Chinese model of rigorous education holds lessons for other education systems around the world.
However, behind the facade of educational “success” is a public concern in Chinese communities that education in China is in a state of crisis. Students’ learning is largely exam-oriented, and what they learn in school does not prepare them for future challenges in life. In general, students lack creativity and critical thinking, incapable of performing innovative work. They are not educated to be responsible citizens; education is failing to cultivate in them a basic sense of morality and social responsibility. Education becomes largely an instrument for economic gain and social mobility, devoid of the basic meaning of person–making—in the sense of self-cultivation or self-formation.
Yet, the idea of person-making is at the heart of the Confucian heritage of educational thinking. It has long been held that self-cultivation is a precondition for cultivating the critical and creative potentials of the individual and enabling him or her to fulfill social responsibilities and functions. The centrality of self-formation is also deeply entrenched in the Western tradition of educational thinking. Since the time of Kant, education has largely been tasked with producing the kind of individuals who are rational, autonomous, law-biding, and capable of critical and independent thinking. Despite education in China has been “modernized” through the adaptation of a school system from the West, together with Western curricular structure, theory and practice, and despite numerous efforts has been made to revivify the Confucian tradition of educational thinking, the concept of person-making, either in the Confucian or Western sense, fails to take root in educational theory and practice in China.
This is the first book to discuss the notion of person-making in relation to education in China. Written mostly by oversea and mainland Chinese scholars, this collected volume analyzes (1) how the meaning of person-making has evolved and changed over the process of modernization of education in China, (2) how the evolution and change in meaning has impacted the purpose and practice of Chinese education, and (3) what a rediscovery of the meaning of person-making implies for rethinking and re-envisioning the purpose and practice of Chinese education in the current age of globalization and social change. Drawing on Chinese history and culture, Western and Chinese philosophies, educational and curriculum theories, the contributors of the book pursue the analyses and discussions in relation to curriculum, teaching and learning, examination, citizenship education, and educational reform.
This book is intended to be a unique contribution to the study of Chinese education, which has been recently brought to the foreground internationally. A number of books in English have described the recent developments of education in China and explained its educational “success.”  However, what is missing is a book that confronts the current educational crisis and engages in a rethinking and re-envisioning of Chinese education based on cross-cultural and historically and philosophically informed analyses and investigation. Unlike others, this is not an objective description of what is happening, but a normative proposition of what should happen in the face of China’s current challenges and inspiration. Through its analysis of the issues and problems concerning person-making and its argument  for rethinking the purpose  and practice of Chinese education, the book contributes to the development of a more balanced, more sophisticated, and philosophically better grounded understanding of education in China.