Participant Abstracts

"Mahatma Gandhi on Peace Education: The Struggle against Violence and Terror"

We live in a world dominated by the multidimensional forms of violence and terror. Mahatma Gandhi, the best-known twentieth- century proponent of nonviolence, emphasized the importance of peace education. Gandhi serves as a catalyst, challenging dominant Western assumptions and models, including dominant views of education. For him, many highly educated, modern human beings are dangerously and tragically uneducated and unable to deal with contemporary crises involving violence and terror. His model of peace education, emphasizing pluralism and diversity and dialogue, offers radical alternatives for analyszing and struggling with violence and terror.

Beneath the surface difference of skin colour and cultural background we are united in the desire to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. As human beings we are by our very nature, relational and the discourse of ethics requires us to examine the relationship we have to ourselves, to others and to the environment. This paper argues that the present debate on citizenship in Australia and in our global community ought to better reflect this complex interdependence. The concept of ‘inclusion’ and ‘a fair go’ has been replaced by the dialogue of difference, of securing borderlines--the latest Government-sanctioned tool for citizenship protection comes in the form of the ‘Immigration Dob-In Line’ a direct national phone line where Australian citizens can identify those perceived to be different [and therefore threatening] no proof required. This not-so-subtle reinforcement of ‘self and ‘other’ underlines the practise of exclusion leading to conflict and violence. This practise promotes the subtle extensions of violence that begin in the mind with thoughts of fear, hatred and anger even before we see the more obvious forms of physical violence.

This paper explores as a matter of urgency, the need to develop a personal toolkit for peacebuilding, a range of skills for resolving differences and removing boundaries. It is entirely achievable through the practise of nonviolence, an alternative approach that provides a choice for the moral agent to access and exercise power outside of the violence spectrum. The logic of nonviolence seeks power within a disciplined framework that views violence as harmful and inevitably short-sighted: “True nonviolence is more than the absence of violence. It is the persistent and determined application of peacable power to offences against the community – in this case the world community.” [King 1967:184] As philosophy compels us to know ourselves, nonviolence confronts others to know themselves as our fellow citizens.

Yang Zhu (IV century B.C.) is a controversial chinese thinker whose identity is obscure. He has no book recorded under the title “Master Yang” and the documents wich expound the theories ascribed to him do not mention his name. Some scholars put into question his real existence, others stress the importance of his doctrines. His thought has traditionally been characterized as demonstrating a selfish indifference to the rest of society because he advocate withdrawal from the political involvement in favour of attending to one’s personal welfare through self-cultivation practices. For this reason Yang Zhu is portrayed in Confucian sources as a champion of egoism.

The aim of this paper is to show how yangist theories based on the principles of “valuing the self” and “giving importance to life” on the one hand developed a heremitic ideal of detechment from society and political affairs, while on the other they formed a solid background for the education of the Ruler.

"Imaging Other Possible Worlds: Learning About Others, Learning About Ourselves"

Transnational literacy, a concept coined by Gayatry Spivak, involves “thinking against the grain of what we think we know and don’t know; it demands alertness to the changing function of what it means to take certain positions within local and global contexts" (Brydon, 2003:7). In this paper, I intend to present the conceptual and pedagogical framework of the DFID funded educational project Other Worlds, hosted by Mundi, a development education centre in Nottingham, and developed by a collective of educators and activists from the UK, Brazil and India in 2004. Its overall aim was to foster the creation of 'open spaces' for dialogue in order to encourage critical engagement with issues related to globalisation and its effects, building ‘transnational literacy’ and transnational solidarity. The proposed approach is based on a pedagogy of questioning that goes beyond normalisation, coercion and persuasion, and that intends to promote independent thinking and autonomy by focusing on interdependence and dialogue - on hybridity, self-reflexivity and 'critical contamination'.

"Dimensions of Confucian Education: An Interpretation of the Ethical Fundamentals of 'Understanding' and 'Practice'

My paper focuses on the philosophical interpretation of the specific Confucian notion of education, morally grounded, and of its final objective: the “authentic human behaviour”.

First, this analysis is based on a new definition and interpretation of several particular early Confucian and Neo-Confucian (Song dynasty) syntagms: Dao道, Reality-One (Nature), authentic aspect of the human nature xing性, natural structure of coherence li理, integral human capacity or authentic human potential de德.

Then, in this context will be developed the meaning and the ethical fundamentals of two major dimensions of Confucian education, understanding (ming明, zhi知) and practise (xing行), as well as of their intrinsic relationship and synonymy. Actually, they represent one and the same thing considered from different points of view, and constitute complementary, intrinsic and indissociable aspects of the human behaviour. Their unity, which signifies the essentiality of the human being, will be the core of this analysis.

Therefore the Confucian notion of “understanding” (understanding Dao, the genuine coherence of the Reality) have as meaning to make use of the authentic aspect of human nature (of the natural structure of coherence, common to all realities and provided by the Nature) by putting constantly into effect the integral human capacity. And this is synonymous with the constant “practise”, the other dimension of Confucian education. In this way, the unity of the complementary polarity understanding-practise can be defined as "authentic human behaviour" - permanently take action in a right manner and at the opportune moment.

That amounts to saying that the exemplary behaviour maintained by the permanent education of oneself signifies being without interruption in contact with the genuine substratum of the Unity (Nature). And this means living in Dao in an active manner, being able to understand it with clarity, intimately, by putting it currently into practice.

The paper will make prominent the specificity of the cultural fundamentals of Confucian Ethics, and in particular of the Chinese Confucian notions of understanding and practise.

“With This Very Body: Or What Kūkai Has to Teach Us about Ritual Pedagogy”

“The Buddha Dharma is nowhere remote. It is in our mind; it is close to us. Suchness is nowhere external. If not within our body, where can it be found?”(Kukai)

The Japanese philosopher Kukai has surprising relevance to understanding ritual in such non-Asian contexts as contemporary new religious movements in the West. One concept of particular interest in understanding ritual as pedagogy is sokushin jobutsu “attaining enlightenment with this very body.” Kukai emphasizes direct religious experience through cultivation of one’s total being—the bodymind—not simply through the intellect. This counters a Western philosophical worldview that privileges mind and text over body and practice. Freezing religion as “text” that is then read and enacted misses the somatic nature of religious praxis and misses ritual as a pedagogy that engages the whole person. Ritual as pedagogy captures somatic modes of attention that are culturally elaborated ways of attending to and with one’s body that includes sensory engagement of the embodied presence of others. Such ritual pedagogy is essential to the core of disciplined praxis that makes successful ritual innovation possible.

Confucius has rightly been labeled “conservative” in his insistence on mastery of the classics and on adherence to the details they prescribe. In this paper, I attempt to understand this conservatism in relation to the broader Confucian project. Confucius promotes the classics not intending simply to accord with the past. Rather, Confucius adheres to the classics intending to promote the formation of unique persons in the present. Deficiency in form, according to Confucius, excludes one from participation in modes of intercourse through which one’s unique qualities register as significant. Orthodoxy serves this function. By adhering to form, Confucius does not intend to stifle innovation and uniqueness in his students. To the contrary, Confucius understands form to be necessary for the preservation of such qualities. In this way, the conservatism of Confucius is subordinate to an aim that is remarkably progressive.

“Verifying the Inaccessible: The Role of Agama Study in Scholastic Buddhist Philosophy”

The paper will be about the controversial topic of the verifiability of Buddhist sutra claims for Indian Buddhist logicians, who had rejected “authoritative testimony” as a valid means of knowledge (more detailed outlines forthcoming).

"Religious Education or Religious Instruction in Publicly Funded Schools in India?"

Should religious education be available in schools funded by the state? This is the primary question to be addressed in my paper. I shall deal with this issue both historically and from the perspective of ethical and political theory.

The debates in the Constituent Assembly provide a good background to an ethical treatment of this issue. In the assembly, the case against religious instruction was made on at least four grounds.

Public education must inculcate a sense of inclusive citizenship, instead. The case for it was made on the following grounds:

(a) helps people understand the best interpretation of a religion rather than its worst,

(b) contrary to the claim of opponents, it promotes communal amity,
(c) because morality and religion are intertwined, it was necessary for the moral
foundation of society.

(d) The very distinction between religion, philosophy and culture makes no sense in Hinduism. Therefore, taking religion out of public education would mean virtually excluding Indian culture and civilization. In this context. Ambedkar made an interesting distinction between religious instruction and religious education and argued in favour of religious education.

The paper critically examines these arguments and in the light of circumstances today tries to arrive at a ethically sensitive judgment on this issue

I begin with a working conception of what it means to be a global citizen: as one whose allegiances, concerns, and forms of thought extend beyond national boundaries. Next I focus on Jiddu Krishnamurti, for two reasons. One, for his views on education, which might be viewed as oriented toward turning out students committed to global citizenship values; Two, as a person who might be thought to be a global citizen himself. What are Krishnamurti’s educational methods and goals, and what have these to do with the cultivation of global citizenship values? Seeing Jiddu Krishnamurti as a specific example of a global citizen, on the other hand, provides us with the occasion to ask a more general question: is this the sort of individual we necessarily admire? What precisely do we gain, as individuals, and/or as a community, by the cultivation of these values? What might we lose? As part of this discussion I will consider the role played by concepts like authenticity and appropriation, as well as the function of acts of categorization of various kinds, by way of showing that even if global citizenship is prima facie a goal that ought to be valued, there are a number of interesting philosophical challenges to be tackled along the way.

In this presentation I take off from Francois Jullien's claim that readers of Chinese poetry are not led to see but rather move as they please. The crux of this claim, according to Jullien, lies in the nature of Chinese poetics, but I will attempt to show that such an assumption on the part of a Chinese poet, namely that a reader can be trusted to respond appropriately absent the poet's direct guidance, assumes a unique view of responsiveness that 1) is in need of elaboration and that 2) when elaborated, is relevant to the interactions that occur in education. In the first section of this paper, I introduce a new category of syntactic transitivity that signals the core of intersubjectivity. Standard syntactic monotransitivity presumes an agent manipulating an object but does not speak to the case of the objectitself being an agent. Here I address the issue of the object as agent and identify this kind of semantic transitivity as intertransitivity. In the second section of the paper, I analyze the component parts of intertransitivity. Philosophically, it is not enough to say that intertransitivity involves an agent as object because it presupposes the question of what distinguishes an agent object from a non-agent object. The result of this analysis is an understanding of the responsiveness of the agent object. In the third part, I apply this new understanding of agent object responsiveness to the case of education, revealing that the heart of effective education presumes a spontaneous responsiveness on the part of the learner that is identical to the responsiveness that Chinese poets assume in their readers.

Derrida on the Education of Philosophy, Translated towards Comparative Thinking"

In light of the recent translations of Jacques Derrida’s main works on ‘education and philosophy,’ this paper proposes to discuss the position of Derrida with regard to the place of education in general and the education of philosophy in particular, in the schools as well as within the university system as we know it today, and to then relate these thoughts to comparative philosophy.

Derrida has argued that the question whether philosophy should be taught in secondary schools and universities is one that should definitely be answered in the positive, yet nowadays philosophers find themselves constantly having to defend philosophy and its teaching against ever increasing pressure from the powers that be. The value of philosophy (and its education) is not obvious any more. Or, in any case, it does not seem to fit in our modern societies, which are increasingly based on capitalism and market economy. Against the threat of being sanitized away philosophy has had and will have again to defend itself. But in Derrida’s case this defence is anything but a protection of the status quo. Derrida’s ‘protection’ of philosophy is a two-faced one, one that entails a double bind.

This double bind consists first of all, as said, in protecting philosophy against the ongoing onslaught of other disciplines and from outside forces, by the “State and by a certain liberal logic of the marketplace.”[1] But in second place this protection of philosophy is also an attack on it, or more to the point an attack on a certain idea of philosophy and on a philosophical protectionism, against which Derrida argues that it is narrow and self-defeating, as the true spirit of philosophy lies exactly in questioning itself on its premises, and of course on questioning other disciplines on theirs. The defenders of the status quo in philosophy and teaching in general are equally to be criticized for not allowing anything new to ‘invade’ philosophy; that is, for structurally denying and marginalizing anything that does not fit their picture of philosophy or of how and when it should be taught, and thereby withholding anything ‘other’ a proper place within philosophy.

This paper will then explain the position of Derrida with regard to the teaching of philosophy and situate that position within his wider work. The translations of Du Droit à la Philosophie will form a background for this, and argue that teaching of philosophy and philosophy itself should be inherently open to new developments, not merely repetitive of what we already know. It will also explain the ideas Derrida has on the place of the university, as a place of reason and grounding, but with a far wider scope than traditionally understood. Derrida tries again to protect the university as an institution, but will in similar vein attack its current position. The university as we know it today is a thoroughly Western institution, based on a nineteenth century restructuring of older institutions, and has thus developed into different departments, faculties etc, all dealing in their way with the principle of reason. What needs to happen is to open this rigid structure up, and that does not just mean more interdisciplinary activities, it also means an intradisciplinary transformation of the core teachings of philosophy and the opening up towards new and other disciplines which were previously denied space within the university system. Thus the double bind, a defence and offence at the same time.

Then this paper will continue to show how Derrida’s ideas on education are coherent with an appreciating and resituating of comparative philosophy. I will focus on the openness that philosophy should exhibit, explaining that this openness should definitely entail a greater space for comparative philosophy. Here I think of the marginalization of other than Western philosophy within the university system. But inside the discipline of comparative philosophy there is also a tendency to accept authority of interpretation, to let one interpretation prevail and become more powerful than others, even while textual analysis does not really support this privilege. So similarly, comparative philosophy should open up towards dissenting, different views of how to interpret thinking in other cultures, and not show the same stifling one-sidedness that Western philosophy and philosophical education has shown. The university should be a place that is more “planetary,” and not universal, to use Heidegger’s expression. Derrida therefore plays with the Heideggerian notion of “thought” and of a “community of thought” replacing that of ‘traditional’ philosophy. This “community of thought” entails the expanding of thinking over the narrow Western confines of philosophy as “pure” reason or rationality, but also over the confines of the ever more influential technological and economic end-oriented reason. To call these Western concepts into question is precisely the merit of comparative philosophy, and as such it has potential to be a starting point from which to interrogate these fundamental values of Western philosophy. But only if comparative philosophy guards itself against a certain idea of appropriation, of accommodation, which would amount to reducing or marginalizing the differences between cultures, and simultaneously guards itself against an overly radical relativism, whereby different cultures are beyond criticism and understanding.

The title of this paper appeals to us, not only because it has an alliterative flow, but because focusing on focusing seems to be a good starting point for getting started. Achieving a different, perhaps unique, focus often leads to new perspectives, which in turn trigger newly emergent conceptions worthy of elaboration. Nevertheless, we suggest that the habit of charging ahead with another new focus often ignores the ambience of the field within which the focus might have fomented. We suggest that in the field of education the habit of charging ahead with a focus is particularly prevalent and that the success of such charging not only prevents us from considering other foci, it also renders further journeys into the field a waste of time. Concomitantly, living in an ambient “moment” becomes a mere momentary distraction.

In this paper we should like to play again with the field/focus complementarity (Ames & Hall, 2002) in the hopes of bringing forth education without the necessity of relying on a focus. As we developed this paper, we kept coming to the realization that “being present” was at the core of becoming educated. We then began searching for ways of articulating this by exploring distinctions within the field/focus complementarity that would deepen our understanding of becoming educated through presence. In this regard, the work of Maturana & Varela (1997) and our own efforts (Sawada & Caley, 1993; Sawada & Caley, 2004) have been salient We suggest that the current habit of requiring a focus before beginning any educational experience prevents that experience from becoming deeply educative.

"Turning the Whole Soul: The Educational Dialectic of A Sand County Almanac"

In the seventh book of the Republic, Plato says that education is not a matter of transmitting information from teacher to learner but of turning the whole soul toward the objects of knowledge—for Plato, the eternal forms. Aldo Leopold seems to have believed something similar about environmental education. It should be something more than just transmitting information about natural history and environmental issues. Environmental education should even also consist of something more than transmitting appropriate environmental values. It should be nothing less than a matter of worldview remediation, a turning of the whole soul not away from the realm of appearances to the realm of forms, as Plato would have it, but from one cognitive nexus for organizing experience to another. Leopold believed that his Western contemporaries organized experience through a complex and not altogether self-consistent Judeo-Christian consumerist worldview. At its core was the belief that nature is a pool of resources divinely ordained for human use. Leopold sought to replace that worldview with another, grounded in evolutionary biology and ecology. His masterpiece, A Sand County Almanac, is designed to be the vehicle of this transformation. Part One seductively draws the reader into the charms of an evolutionary-ecological worldview through personal, experiential narrative. Part Two gently but firmly exposes the reader to a more discursive, unadorned account of the evolutionary-ecological worldview and confronts some of its moral and spiritual conundrums. Part Three traces the nomothetic and normative implications of an evolutionary-ecological worldview up to and including a "land ethic." The success of Leopold's essentially transformative (not transcendent) vision of environmental education turns on two assumptions that Leopold never questions. The first is that a cognitive shift, a shift in ideas, brings about a behavioral shift, a shift in action. But does it really? The second is that such a shift can be deliberately effected through education. Perhaps worldview remediation (or evolution) itself occurs in a more quasi-Darwinian fashion—through a competition of memes, not genes, complicated by the phenomenon of memetic drift in the human meme pool. If so, can the evolutionary-ecological meme set (memome) outcompete the Judeo-Christian consumerist meme set? Finally, does talking this way—about memes, memones, and their evolution through competitive selection—illegitimately privilege the evolutionary-ecological worldview, the very thing in question.

"The Subtlety of Place: The Lost Art of Phenomenology and Being in the World"

Do places matter educationally? Well, I think they do and so does Edward Casey when he remarks: “The world is, minimally and forever, a place-world”. We might take this remark as presupposing without argument that places exist as a given, that we know what a place is, a point that Aristotle would have never taken for granted and in fact neither does Casey. I find Casey’s remark that we live in ‘a place-world’ an immensely rich turn of phrase, forever packed with an infinite and diverse range of landscapes reflecting our being in the world, a maze of wonders, an orchestra of different subtle sounds where places are witnessed, mimicked and created. We submerge ourselves in the gamesome labour of place and learn to perceive and quiver in its light. I will discuss through a phenomenological perspective the self-giveness of place experience, the unfolding of a life that is an aspect of one’s own space and horizon. When Casey surmises: “One has no choice but to deal with what is in place, or at place: that is, what is at stake there”, it must follow that place and places are forever at the centre of educational work.

Kimo Cashman's paper, Looking in the hole with my three prong cocked, is a collection of stories crafted in the tradition of indigenous research. Within each story, Cashman connects himself to the past, the present, and the future; and in doing so, becomes the conduit for the transfer of knowledge from one generation to another. His stories cry out to all indigenous peoples, not so much in that they detail the sufferings of peoples dispossessed, but because they talk of hope for the future and the journey that this will involve. As he contemplates this journey, Cashman seeks guidance from his ancestors for ways to keep the Native Hawaiian people warm and strong, to help them to overcome their fears, and to help them make good choices for their future. Cashman’s stories are research at its best.

The life of Sun Yat-sen and his foreign travels and contacts have received considerable scholarly attention since his death in 1925. Less examined, however, are his years as an Iolani School and Punahou School student in the waning years of the independent Hawaiian kingdom. In his remarks, Al Castle, a scholar of Hawaiian history, will adumbrate the political environment that Sun Yat-sen found himself in while a youth in Hawaii and will examine the curriculum and very different "cultures" of the two outstanding college preparatory schools the future anti-Manchu revolutionary leader benefited from. Special attention will be paid to what lessons he may have learned at both schools and their possible influence on his future political, moral and economic thought.

The moral feelings which warm our hearts towards the good and against the bad include disgust, for example, at the inhuman way Iraqi prisoners were treated in Abu-Ghraib prison. Yet disgust is a kind of loathing which seems to banish its target from the human realm to the realm of vermin or biological waste. So how can it remain a “moral” feeling? One cannot direct a moral attitude or an ‘ought’ statement towards corpses or filth! Should moral education, then consist of teaching us how to cultivate or how to overcome disgust at heinous offenders?

A similar puzzle crops up in the context of transformation of disgust (at the ugly, at the macabre or the grotesque) into aesthetic relish.

Our positive art-experience is a cognitive-affective-creative response to the beautiful or apt.

The disgusting or the ugly is simply opposed to the beautiful and in-apt. And yet good paintings, good plays or films or stories or poems depicting the disgusting and the ugly are quite often objects of positive art-experience. How can we solve this paradox ? Taking examples from renaissance and modern European literature and painting, as well as classical and 20^th century Indian art and literature, this paper tries to solve the problem of the aesthetic representation of the disgusting by making use of Abhinavagupta( 11^th century Kashmiri Philosopher)’s insights about “Biibhatsa” as a “rasa”( art-transformed emotion). In the light of contemporary examples such as the paintings of Francis Bacon, I try to adapt Abhinavagupta’s theory and come up with a many-faceted richer theory of how the repulsive is miraculously rendered relishable by the magic touch of the artist’s “pratibhaa”.

Incidentally, that gives us also a hint as to how one can make a distinction between, morally correct disgust, morally incorrect disgust, and contexts where existential disgust leads to spiritual detachment leading us beyond revulsion and attraction.

This paper is to examine Nietzsche's and Confucius's ideas on learning from history. Learning and studying is indispensible in Confucius's teaching. It is also an essential process for Nietzsche, although this area is largely neglected in previous researches. He writes a full-length book, On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, to appeal for distinctions on the use of history. Antiquarian history is the valuable wisdom and experiences of past generations and it provides a kind of linkage to one's ancestors. It is comparable to Confucius's emphasis on the rituals of ancestral and funeral services dating to the early Zhou. According to Nietzsche, antiquarian history will eventually become dogmatic as time goes by, critical history is needed. One has to reflect on what one has learned and evaluate it. Confucius's revitialization of the zhouli with new elements such as ren and yi can be taken as the products of a critical historian. Monumental history is then formed by the great historical figures whom Nietzsche calls cultural exemplars. Their goal is the happiness of humanity. They are slao examples and models for future generations.

Philosophers have always been teachers. Socrates was executed for what he was supposed to have taught; Plato’s plan for education was a fundamental part of his utopian Republic; and Confucius’ relationship to his students is crucial to understanding the Analects. The Greek and Chinese traditions however hold radically different views about the role of literature, poetry and music. For Confucians the Odes play a leading role in the education of future philosophers, sage kings and government officials. Plato insists that in generally poetry should be forbidden in a just society, tolerated only on the periphery of the education of philosopher kings as “necessary” or “noble” lies. This paper explores the reasons behind these widely different views of poetry and the implications of these views for classical and modern understandings of truth and compassion, justice and emotional balance.

What makes a human person human is that he starts his life from learning from environment and learning from others like him. He has to learn to be part of his environment and a member of his community or tribe. And yet he has to learn to transcend himself for his environment and for his community, and even he may have to transcend his community and his environment in order to do good to his environment and his community. Education therefore is a complex continuing process of self-formation, which is fused, with both intelligent and practical understanding of the self in a context of community and in a context of environment. If we look into the natural history of evolution of species, you find that it is indeed the survival of the strongest among many species or within a species, but how do we understand the strongest and how do we understand the survival? It is obvious that the strength of a species or an individual lies not in his physical power or his technical skill alone but in his ability to adapt to an environmental niche to which no other species could easily invade. The species becomes an expert and yet a part of its environment so that it can act mostly in a natural way with natural protection from the environment. The species and its members survive and even flourish because no other species have those environmental advantages and expertise and also because other species have to be environmentally adapted to their respective niches in the environment without being able to surpass other species in specific and particular areas of the environment. One may therefore see the evolution of the species as adaptation to environment, differentiation and specification according to environment, individual selection and transformation, all of which can be regarded as a process of education which is implicit in the formation of species and species-individuation, including the pre-formation of forms and genes.

In light of this evolutionary model of species development, to survive and flourish is to evolve and to evolve is to educe, and to educe is to induce, to adduce, to conduce, to seduce, and to produce and even to deduce or to reduce for productive and useful ends. Here I am not simply playing words, but I believe that formation of certain set of words has a core or a root which indicate a root action or a root state of human person. Hence the Latin root “duce” is such a root action indicating efficacious transference (leading) of a quality or state from one entity to another, hence indicating the actualization of a relation that fulfills and changes a situation. Hence in light of this primary understanding of a root action, different manners and modes of realization and development become possible due to different contexts and different purposes envisioned by the human agents. Hence we have deduction from a premise to a conclusion. We have induction from experienced instances to a generality. We have seduction under unusual circumstances in terms of attraction. We have adduction when we are able to produce something naturally for support. We have production when we form products under our design and labor. We have conduction that is guiding according to a pre-determined principle or rule. We have reduction when we explain or accept some given situation in terms of certain basic conditions. [i] Finally, we have education as a form of developing a human mind and human person by all different manners of enabling the human individual to grow and achieve a desirable state of being where he can become a worthwhile and self-responsible human person as well as a reliable and useful member of the society. It is also expected that this educated individual would make creative contribution to the valuable growth of other individuals and the social community at large. He will be also able to contribute to the greater creativity in a larger context of life such as the whole world and the whole experienced cosmos by creatively changing our conditions of life.

In this sense education must start with the driving force of life to shape itself and place itself in the world from the very beginning of life and must continue until one finds a resting place in a person’s interaction with nature, community and others. But all species do evolve in a process where many species perish due to their lack of abilities and alertness to the change of environment (such as regarding climate, earth movement and some other factors such as meteoritic impact) and many others transforms themselves for a better coping up with environmental crises and become new species and endure. As part of environment, a species goes up or goes down with the changes of the environment. Yet it could overcome difficulties and challenges by preserving or developing its own potentiality. Perhaps, it is in terms of this possibility of transcending environment and yet adapting to the environment that higher animals such as human beings develop and evolve themselves. In this sense evolution of a species and specifically the evolution of the human species is highly educational and our native sense of education must be accounted for in terms of such a basic level in this evolutionary model. Man becomes man because, unlike other animal species, he has learned from environment so that he may transcend and integrate environment to adapt to a larger and changing environment. In a sense he learns to become the master of himself and yet he remains a student of environment. His advance and progress to being human is no accident, because this advance and progress requires efforts in practice and knowledge in understanding his environment. This means that the human species must become constantly conscious of his environment and creatively applies his self to the environment so that he remains both within and without his environment at the same time.

The success story of man in the evolutionary history is truly educational because it is an education from adaptation to transcendence and back to adaptation again. It is a process of man learning to educate himself, in the sense of learning to rise up from the level of the habitual and unconscious to higher levels of existence which require consciousness and knowledge of the world (other people, things in the world and the large cosmos) and reflective consciousness of the self without however losing sight of how it stands to the things in the environment are. From this we see how we can reformulate our notion of a primitive and yet primary and hidden sense of education which emerges from our the conscious level of learning: Education is primarily learning and learning from learning so that one becomes more both a recipient and an agent than merely a recipient. Not only one has to become an agent apart from being a recipient, but one has to become more and more a creative agent and even a more and more a creative recipient in the sense of creativity, which lies in transcending oneself to become a new self and in adapting to environment to become protecting environment from infliction from the human self. To become creative is the process in which values become envisioned and implemented so that individual well-being and collective harmony among individuals and communities of individuals could be evolved and established.

The evolutionary model of education eventually becomes an interaction-transactional model of education. With both evolution and environment in view and as a background, education has to be regarded as both an unconscious natural instinctive formation and development of a human quality we may call human nature, and a conscious and conscientious effort of the human being to shape, define and refine himself into a human person and a moral being as humanity must be eventually conceived as morality which involves not only sociality but nobility of individual character. With his evolutionarily ingrained proclivity toward educational change, education is so basic that we tend to forget what it means and consequently tend to ignore its existence as a basic need and fail to tackle its environmental background and evolutionary resources. We have to reconfigure education as a native and inner drive in the individuals that would necessarily lead to a social, cultural and even political program for both the individual and the communal society. We have to re-learn from a reflection on the evolutionary process to refresh our sense of basic education, which is simultaneously individual, specific, generic, interactive, societal, environmental, and cosmic. We have to re-affirm its goal to achieve creative adaptation and creative advance, by discovering or re-discovering its natural and cultural contexts so that we can re-define what the human self is worthy of in such contexts. We have to recognize what earth and heaven, animal life and human life mean to us in an ever-changing and ever-challenging context of being and becoming in which our ability and intelligence for achieving a higher order of life of a higher quality have to be re-developed and recognized. In this sense education is self-awakening to efforts of human self-improvement and the rebuilding of human consciousness of the world and environment as part of its own existence.

Education is therefore in its very nature environmental, global, cosmic and cosmological. The question is whether we can still keep this vision and maintain our consciousness of the human needs and human potential in this open evolutionary process of creative adaptation. The question is whether we can achieve an intelligent freedom of will so that we will not be enslaved by the habits of the niche in which we find ourselves or the arrogance of power which we have acquired and which blind us to crises and challenges arising from our abode and our future. The question is whether we can transcend ourselves and yet care for what we have transcended and do our best to integrate in such a way as to live and let live, to allow open space and open time for higher growth and multi-dimensional development. The question is how to educate our selves for a comprehensive morality, which is rooted in the basic, the earthly and the heavenly at the same time. The question is how to educate ourselves to achieve peace, prosperity and harmony in the world in which each and every human being or human group would contribute to the well-being of the other.

In the rest of the article I shall examine two fundamental models of educational philosophy in light of this new sense of education, which has stressed both continuous engagement with a world of change and contingency and creative growth of the individual in view of an enlarging involvement inclusive of global and cosmic dimensions. These two fundamental models are the Deweyan Model of Contextual Pragmatism of Experience and the Confucian Model of Onto-Cosmology of Self-Cultivation. Both models have great merits of their own, and yet each of them could be improved in light of the other. I shall point out and argue that this improvement must come from simultaneously learning morality from experience and learning experience from morality in light of the basic evolution of the human species in a global and cosmic environment. It is a matter of education for morality in a global and cosmic context so that what is and what ought to be forms a dynamical unity. It is also a matter of reflection on what the global and the cosmic present and provide for the education of the man toward man’s own moral transformation.

The lessons from this examination can be used to illuminate current national and global approaches to inter-human solidarity and world peace in today’s world: namely, to provide an incentive for re-thinking and enlivening of discursive rationalism from modern European tradition, to lead an open reflection for broadening neo-pragmatism from modern America, and to introduce and implement a democratic vision of moral humanism in the spirit of intellectual inter-subjectivity from modern Chinese tradition. It can be seen that a global and cosmic education for morality should integrate the three traditions in order to achieve the goal of inter-human solidarity and inter-cultural integration toward a comprehensive harmony and creatively sustainable order of the globe and the cosmos, in which human beings can live and prosper for a long time. However, I shall not detail and elaborate on these lessons in this article.

[i] Charles Peirce has introduced a form of reasoning called “abduction”, which is to accentuate the necessity or probability of making a relevant hypothesis for explaining and predicting a given phenomenon stated in a statement This statement would be a conclusion of the abductive reasoning. It is obvious that abduction, in opposition to adduction (or deduction) and induction, is a bold move away from a given scene but a powerful move for saving and “mastering” the given scene. We may define “abductive education” as a form of education toward free play of mind for imaginative creation in arts and science.

This paper presents an argument for a Qualitarian Philosophy of Education (and its implied theory of educational aims), drawing on the philosophies of Aristotle and Mencius and setting these against the prevalent liberal philosophy of education. The liberals see education as instrumental to promoting the good life, which is defined as the maximal satisfaction of desires determined by oneself and safeguarded by the liberal value of personal autonomy. Qualitarianism firstly draws on the Aristotelian conception of arête, translated as “quality.” Hence the Aristotelian conception of eudaimonia (the life of happiness, or well-being) is seen as the fullest actualization of “quality.” This Qualitarian stance also draws on the Mencian primacy of qualities of the heart over the qualities of the mind and body, plus its related philosophical anthropology. A taxonomy of eight categories of human qualities is proposed in terms of three dichotomies: qualities of heart (virtues) vs qualities of power (excellence), minimal qualities vs maximal qualities, general qualities vs special qualities. Its relevance to educational practice will also be explored.

"Dewey on Philosophy, Democracy, and Education"

For Dewey, a democracy is basically a communal association dedicated to maximizing the degree of shared interests within the society and the freedom to develop new interests, both common and personal. Dewey writes that “such a society must have a type of education which gives individuals a personal interest in social relationships and control and habits of mind which secure social changes without introducing disorder.” I shall examine his philosophy of education as contained in works like Democracy and Education, that he recommended for anyone who wished to understand the nature of his philosophy. In fact, the standard critiques of his views on education result from a failure to understand his unique, pragmatic stance on knowledge, experience, the nature of a human being, and the nature and purpose of philosophy. It was Dewey’s belief that philosophy is most authentic when it addresses the most pressing issues of the day. I will try to show how Dewey’s views on education, democracy, and philosophy are interrelated and how they resonate with important aspects of Confucian philosophy.

"Claiming Indigenous Knowledge"

In his paper, Hänau kahikikü me kahikimoe: A call for the development of a theory for Kanaka Maoli visual culture education, Clark argues for a visual arts curriculum that is grounded in the perspective of Native Hawaiian culture. As an artist and art educator, Clark carefully argues his position within the cultural and historical context of Hawai'i and the Hawaiian people. His proposal for Native Hawaiians and Native Hawaiian knowledge and practices to be accorded their rightful place in Hawai'i raises the question: What should be the nature of this presence? Approaches to learning and teaching that successfully engage indigenous peoples in all arenas of education are desperately needed. As Clark and fellow Native Hawaiian artists and art educators conceptualize, research, and implement visual culture education in Hawai'i, one thing is apparent—the need to prepare a new generation of Native Hawaiian leaders in the arts—leaders who are theorists, practitioners, educators, and activists, capable of demanding places for the Native Hawaiian art movement in Hawai'i and throughout the international arena.

For the past nine years the Hawai’i Philosophy in the Schools program has been involved in introducing a particular model of education – Philosophy for Children - to the People’s Republic of China, and since 1995 Hawai’i educators have offered more than a dozen workshops on the theory and practice of Philosophy for Children in cities across China. While the warm reception with which the Hawaii program was received has been documented, a number of questions remain. First, to what extent does the exportation of Philosophy for Children constitute a form of cultural imperialism? How does one respond to the cynic who sees the efforts of Hawai’i educators as a particularly insidious form of colonization which has as its prize not China’s ports and resources, but the minds of her children? To answer this question I will attempt to uncover cultural assumptions within the Practice of Philosophy for Children. Secondly, how have Chinese educators adapted and implemented Philosophy for Children to address their own particular needs and circumstances, and what cultural assumptions does this adaptation reveal? In answering these questions I intend to demonstrate that Philosophy for Children represents not so much a culturally specific way of thinking, but a method for building a community of inquiry adaptable to different cultures and values, yet in resonance with the Confucian emphasis on learning, community, and humanity.

Jullien makes a very cogent case for the pervasiveness of indirection in Chinese culture and in Chinese philosophical thinking. Detour and Access gives a series of examples from various eras and various texts, each exemplifying some aspect of indirectness, and exhibiting its central importance in shaping Chinese cultural sensibilities. But Jullien does not consider the merits of the opposing case: the instances of directness (zheng), clarity (ming), and distinctness (bie) that can be found in early Chinese philosophy. The exhortation to “directness of language” (zhengming) of Confucius and Xunzi immediately come to mind, and perhaps also the ‘logical’ work of Huizi, Gongsun Longzi, and the later Mohists. I shall raise the question: to what extent do such concerns bring early Chinese philosophy closer to the core of western philosophical thinking as characterized by Jullien?

"Pedagogy in a Global Context: The Relevance of Schiller's Letters on Education"

Can global education be entrusted to a global elite relying on the dictates of (Western-style) reason? Or can global education draw on the latent impulses and motivations of peoples in local settings? In his three Critiques, Kant had erected a strict dichotomy between universal reason and non-rational sensibility or inclinations. In his "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Humankind" Friedrich Schiller attempted to overcome this
dichotomy by exploring the potential of an aesthetic sensibility (or "Spieltrieb") which would reconcile reason and contingency, moral duty and inclination.

Partly continuing the work of Herder, Schiller in these Letters intimated the possibility of a pluralistic learning process among cultures bypassing both bland (rationalist) cosmopolitanism and cultural parochialism or clash of civilizations. The paper will examine the implications of Schiller's Letters in a global setting. In a first step, some parallels will be explored between the Letters, on the one hand, and Confucian "heart-mind learning" and Islamic 'adab, on the other. Finally, the paper will allude to possible affinities between the Letters and Heideggerian "poetic" education and Freire's "pedagogy of the heart."

The present day curriculum in

India

—and perhaps in most of other countries—is organised in various school subjects. While there is nothing wrong in a subject-based curriculum organisation per say, the inadequacy or absence of a coherent epistemological framework lends the Indian curricula in serious problems. In this paper three of such problems (namely: teaching of subjects in a manner that may be counter productive in the light of educational aims, the problem of content selection (inclusion/exclusion of various topics and subjects) and curricular load, and the organisation of and importance given to subjects) that are debated in the curricular discourse in India will be briefly defined.

I will try to show that the presently used epistemic framework is incapable of adequately answering these questions because a) it has inadequate understanding of relationship between aims of education and knowledge, b) knowledge is seen as information verbalised and collected in books and c) it leaves out of curriculum large areas of human capabilities and knowledge that have significant bearing on achievement of educational aims. I will then suggest an outline of an alternative epistemic framework for curriculum planning that has a potential of becoming adequate to deal with such problems when fully developed.

An Exploration of Creativity and its Limits among Tibetan Monk Scholars”

The general perception of scholasticism is that it is almost by definition uncreative, being associated with sterile questions as exemplified by the proverbial "how many angels can fit on the pin of a needle?" This essay examines this question within the context of Tibetan monastic tradition, analyzing the degree to which such a tradition can be said to be creative. At first sight, it may seem that the answer is obviously negative, given that every monk is supposed to uphold the exact orthodoxy of their monastery. A more careful analysis of scholastic practices reveal, however, that far from being uncreative, the tradition provides ample room for new discoveries and unexpected encounters through debate. The paper analyzes the way in which Tibetan debates provide room for creativity. It also raises the more difficult question of knowing how the freedom that is necessitated for the creative process is limited so that monks come to hold the exact opinions they are supposed to.

It has been observed that the most terrifying aspect of Alzheimer’s disease is not that it robs us of the ability to remember things like phone numbers, how to find our way to the supermarket, and the like, but that it robs us of our personal memories and in so doing decimates the very basis of our identity. Commenting on this fact one author has observed that after all, “we are the sum or our memories.”[1] While such an assertion seems quite reasonable in the cultural context of 21^st century North America it holds far less resonance for the Japanese. My paper seeks to plumb Japanese attitudes towards aging and suggest how they might be understood in terms of a set of religious sensibilities which differ in important ways from those in the so-called West. Japanese religious discourse is a particularly rich with reflection on the relationships between old age, memory, and selfhood. In the figure of the sennin, the quasi-divine okina, or in traditions concerning meijin—those who have attained mastery in a given field—we find models for aging and forgetfulness wherein there is no despair over a “loss of self” but rather recognition that there exists a spiritually potent form of selfhood which seems especially suited to the elderly—an “achieved” selfhood which not only allows for forgetfulness but seems, in certain circumstances, to require it. By comparing Japanese approaches and attitudes to those with currency in the West we find a useful contrast to what has been called the “ratiocentrism” or “mentalism” that permeates our thinking about senility, appropriate care for the elderly, and indeed broader issues in bioethics.

[1] Shenk, David The Forgetting Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Auckland (Doubleday) 2001, p. 16

"Education and Reduction: 'Transformative Phenomenology' as an Approach for Education"

The approach of a "transformative phenomenology" was won from a comprehensive analysis of East asian philosophies (Daoism and Buddhism). For daoist and buddhist teachings it is of decisive importance that every analytical knowledge at the same time always means a transformation for the human existence itself. Since the experience of life in daoist and buddhist philosophy is part of the phenomenon of life itself, the knowledge about life is not only a descriptive one but rather a transformative knowledge. That means that the analysis of the life changes and realizes our life in a new way and transforms it from within.

It is tried in using the approach of east asian philosophies as an starting point to deepen and transform certain trends of phenomenology. Going beyond a "descriptive" and "hermeneutical phenomenology" a "transformative phenomenology" is proposed in which the process of its own execution will be a constitutive element of the method itself. The analysis of phenomena isn't longer an act of pure objectivation but a transformation for my perception and existence. The transformation which is performed by the phenomenological work is in this way always connected with my way to live. In the work I encounter my own experience with all possible consequences which an intensive meeting can have. Phenomenology don't mean any longer to describe phenomena as a "pure spectator" but transform myself as a process of Bildung within the encounter with my own bodily and thinking experience.

It is my purpose in this study to take a close look at Socrates’ erotic athletics as it is presented in the Symposium of Xenophon, and compare it with that which we find in the Platonic Symposium. From such a comparison of these two important texts, it will become clear that Xenophon and Plato, in spite of their differences in style and emphasis, would seem to agree in portraying Socrates as a great erotic philosopher and pedagogue of the human soul in search of perfection.

Socrates is presented by both writers as a lover of wisdom, who is more attentive to the beauty of the soul and its potential for ethical and intellectual excellence, than to the body and its potential for excelling in athletic contests. As an integral part of the human being, the body must be trained well in gymnastics and dance. It must be strong and healthy, fit and disciplined to obey reason and to serve the human soul in its quest of eudaimonia through the activity of arete, in its multiple forms, both ethical and intellectual.

This Socratic and Classical Hellenic ideal of kalokagathia, of a good human character in an athletic body, has not lost its appeal even in our times, when the pursuit of philosophy has being sophistically trivialized and the commercialization of athletics intensified. But there is good hope that the return of the Olympic Games to their birthplace in 2004 will contribute to a revival of the Classical Hellenic and Socratic ideal of philosophical and erotic athletics, as envisioned by Plato and Xenophon in their portraits of Erotic Socrates.

A healing-model of education can be derived from indigenous American systems of philosophy and living. Here, I present a healing-model of education based on Navajo and Northwest Coast Teachings.

Among Indian communities in the U.S., the Navajo Nation is one that is particularly successful in preservation of traditional knowledge and ways of life, balanced with its educating young people for professional success within and beyond the boundaries of the reservation. Navajo education is based on the principle of Sa'ah naghaii bikeh hoozhoon, a system of philosophy and living that places human life in harmony with the natural world. This paper explicates principles of Navajo philosophy as sources for the theory and practice of education, and shows how education in Navajo terms concerns the reciprocal relation of self-cultivation and harmonious participation in the domains of nature and human community.

Native Northwest coast philosophy is particularly oriented toward the perpetuation of healing, a concept that implies the achievement of well-being and integration in domains of psychophysical life, nature, and human culture, and importantly, the spiritual domain. Education in traditional native Northwest Coast life is conducted largely through the telling of teaching- stories and the singing of traditional songs, in both family and community settings. Because the knowledge conveyed in traditional stories and songs are considered essential to the generation of wisdom and well-being, complexes of stories and songs are called Medicine Teachings. The paper provides examples and analysis of Medicine Teachings and songs of the SiSiWiss (Sacred Breath) Medicine Society of the Puget Sound region. In the proposed presentation, elements of a healing-model of education will be demonstrated by audio recordings of Medicine Teachings given by native knowledge-keepers who have given me permission to record them.

Without education, the individual can know and do nothing and is blind to the world and its possibilities. Education leads to the development of marvelous skills, new ways of experiencing and understanding things, and a sense of being perfectly at home in the world—an experience involving feelings of ease, familiarity, competence, and contentment. Yet, paradoxically, the process of education also inherently tends to close off possibilities and impose limitations on what we can do, experience, or understand. Indeed, the emotionally and intellectually gratifying experience of feeling at home in the world can easily be transmuted into complacency, blinkered conservatism, and chauvinism. This paper will suggest that the highest level of education—and the most difficult challenge in the process of education—involves learning to avoid the pitfalls and limitations of education itself by remaining open to new ways of acting in, experiencing, and understanding the world. The paper will draw on the classical Chinese texts Xúnzǐ 荀子 and Zhūangzǐ 莊子 to explore the paradoxical nature of education—how it both opens up and closes off possibilities—and sketch a response to the shortcomings and dangers of education. This response is inspired by Zhūangzǐ passages that address the limitations of conventional standards of judgment, how to handle difficulties in the exercise of skill, guidance in action by the world itself, and the possibility of “walking two ways at once” (liǎng xíng 兩行). The paper will conclude by relating this Zhūangist view of education to the wider theme of dialogue between cultures.

Training in Zen meditation is often seen as an esoteric practice whose essence has little to do with other forms of learning. But in fact traditional Zen training can easily be seen as a methodology whose principles reveal the fundamental nature of the educational process. To explore this idea this paper will examine the well-known Ten Ox-herding Pictures used to illustrate Zen training by Kaku-an Shi-en and others. The ideas here will be elaborated with reference to Dogen’s notions of cultivation/authentication and compared with Western, particularly renaissance, ideas of education.

A prominent theme in Buddhist thought is that we should strive to eliminate virtually all forms of anger. This theme is present in the Pali canon, in early Theravada sources such as Visuddhimagga’s The Path of Purification, and especially in the classic text of Mahayana Buddhism, Shantideva’s The Way of the Bodhisattva. There are significant similarities between the Buddhist position on anger and critiques of anger in the Hellenistic philosophers, especially Stoics such as Seneca in his essay On Anger. What is striking is that both Buddhists and Stoics defend the radical thesis that anger is always bad (in each case, a full account would reveal a somewhat more nuanced understanding than this simple assertion). Both Shantideva and Seneca outline educational programs for eradicating anger. However, the Buddhist and Stoic critiques of anger are also divided by deep differences—metaphysical, epistemological, moral, and soteriological. They reach common ground on anger from perspectives that diverge in many respect