Confucianism and Higher Education

Origins and Development of Confucianism

A legendary sage, Confucius was without doubt the most influential and respected educator and philosopher in ancient China. He was born of noble descent in the state of Lu in 551 BCE but led a rather humble life, with a focus on teaching. He traveled through various states over a 14-year period looking for the opportunity to realize his political dream of benevolent governance, but he ended up disillusioned. He returned to his native state, where he taught for the rest of his life. In his later years, Confucius compiled the Six Classics. After his death in 479 BCE, his disciples and their successors compiled the Confucian Analects, which is commonly viewed as the most reliable source of his thought.

Rather than seeking godlike spiritual beings, Confucius believed that the most important focus for human beings and society was the secular world within which everybody should find their own place with an appropriately ordered polity under the governance of the sage-king (junzi) who embodied the virtue of benevolence and acted in accordance with the rites (li). This vision of an ideal sociopolitical order led Confucius to place as much emphasis on education as on politics, since the humanism and rites he advocated were learned social norms rather than an inborn endowment. Confucius believed that it was through education and self-cultivation that every ordinary individual was able to become a sage-king and contribute to society. Based on this idea, Confucius became the first educator in Chinese history to clearly advocate equal opportunity of education for all, regardless of social class, and he was committed to making education available in reality to everybody with a thirst for knowledge (Analects, 15.39; 7.7). As one of the pioneers who opened the first private academies during that era, he taught approximately 3,000 disciples over his lifetime.

Among the early Confucians, Mencius (372 BCE–289 BCE) and Xun Kuang (313 BCE–238 BCE) spearheaded the development of Confucius's original ideas. Mencius juxtaposed humaneness and righteousness, and premised that human nature was originally good, which means education has the practical task of further developing that goodness. It was only in the Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–24 CE) that Confucianism was [Page 444]first officially adopted as political orthodoxy, as proposed by the philosopher Dong Zhongshu (179 BCE–104 BCE). The institutionalization of Confucianism included the establishment of the Taixue, the first imperial university and a major type of higher education institution in China from then up until the early 20th century, and the endorsement of the Five Classics (wujing) as its official curricula. The status of Confucianism as state orthodoxy was further enhanced by the adoption of the imperial civil service examination (keju) in the Sui Dynasty (581–618 CE), a system for the selection of officials based on meritocracy, and by the advocacy of Han Yu (768–824 CE) in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE). More pluralistic forms of Confucian philosophy were also nurtured by such non-imperial higher education institutions as the academies (shuyuan) that first emerged in the late Tang Dynasty and became popular in the following centuries, with many lasting up until the early 20th century.

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