General Education in a New Era: Reforms,Challenges and the Possibility of East-West Learning

More than 2500 years ago, in Greece as well as in China, and maybe in India and other parts of the world, teachers and students sat under a tree and learned. There were no small topics to discuss, as students probed with their teachers about what was the origin of the universe, what were the elements that made our world, or what were the meaning and purposes of life. Learning was for freedom and growth, 1 for exploration, for cultivating the “inner light”, and for building a student’s character. Subjects such as philosophy, physics, math, astronomy, arts, music, were not taught and learned separately but organically integrated. The eventual goal of such an education was for students to find “truth” in life and become an “educated being.” In Plato’s term, this being would be a “Philosopher King” who embodied wisdom, virtue and leadership quality to govern a state, 2 and in Confucius’s mind this person would be someone called Junzi who exemplified perfection in knowledge and virtue, who had the capability to serve the community and the world. 3

Today, we are living a highly fragmented and diversified world. Learning has become very specialized. Students who study natural and social sciences do not have to learn philosophy and be “bothered” with critical issues such as those about the world’s origin, life’s purpose and human-nature relation. They just need to be highly focused and acquire some very specific skills and knowledge in a narrow field, and those that are granted the most advanced degree in learning are given the title of “Doctor of Philosophy,” with the term philosophy rendered almost irrelevant to what they learn.

Meanwhile, we are living in a world that is becoming smaller with globalization, and countries are learning from each other and competing against each other. Despite the predominant trend to specialize and narrow down in higher learning, there have been endeavors to maintain some elements of the traditional pursuit of “wisdom”, through history, philosophy, math, arts . . .—that maintains some breadth and depth in the students’ learning, and partially help students to maintain the spirit of curiosity and imagination. While students are recognized as distinctive individuals, they also are urged to be social beings that should have the qualities of an engaged citizen, with moral integrity and a sense of social responsibility. These endeavors in higher education have been termed “liberal arts education,” which has been vigorously pursued in many liberal arts colleges in the United States, and which is provided through a general curriculum for all students, regardless of their major or field of study in big public and private universities. In the United States, today, many universities provide a general education for the teaching of some common core values, such as democracy, and aim at outcomes such as ethical reasoning, analytical skills, communication skills and critical thinking. Students take a number of courses from natural sciences, social sciences, and arts and humanities, and some have requirement for study abroad, multicultural learning and civic services.

Although liberal arts education is a term borrowed from the West to China, and the provision of liberal arts education to students is a phenomenon attempted by Chinese universities only for a decade, ancient Chinese education has exemplified the mentality of liberal arts education. For example, Confucius conducted his teaching through dialogues, urging his students to be reflective and mindful of integration of knowledge and action, and Confucian scholars needed to equip themselves with knowledge in classics, poetry, painting, archery, music. They need to be active intellectuals serving this world. 4 Taoist scholars strongly focused on freely opening up their mind and heart to be engaged in the universe, and be immersed with the spirit of the mountains and rivers, birds and flowers. . . . 5 Science was also a pursuit for the Taoists, not with the goal to control nature but for obtaining freedom from lack of wisdom, and from death. However, the traditions got encaged and sidelined with the onset of imperial examination fourteen hundred years ago. Learning became rigid and authoritarian, discussions and dialogues rarely happened between teachers and students, and regurgitation and unquestioning of what one had learned became the norm. The political system in China has at times tightened and at times loosened its control on the minds of teachers and students, but overall, the authoritarian political system has placed great restriction on the explorative spirits of teachers and the students.

Having written the above, what I intend to say is that in terms of what is an educated person, and how an education system can and should impart specialized knowledge while also cultivating a broad mindset and forming the ethical character of students, has long been a dilemma and challenge of the education systems in the world. For the United States, general education has been implemented for more than a century, and is continuing to evolve with the changes in the world, such as the case of the University of Maryland in this special issue. For China, in the last three decades, economic reform and opening are calling for more versatile citizens and workers, and China is aspiring to build “world class” universities by eagerly adopting what seem to have “worked” in developed countries such as liberal arts education in the United States. General education is such an adoption and has been implemented for some years in top Chinese universities. Although people may have used general education as a term interchangeable to liberal arts education, the latter has far richer meaning than the former. General education might be a component of a liberal arts education, but it does not equal to liberal arts education. Hence, while some universities have institutionalized general education, the questions are: Has it worked? How do the Chinese universities understand liberal arts education? In what way has general education have an impact on students’ learning such as critical thinking? What are the challenges? These are some of the questions explored in the articles of this special issue.

Liberal arts education involves macro systemic endeavors. Further, what is very important is how a curriculum is designed and taught as they directly impact on students’ learning. In this globalized world, with the onset of knowledge economy and society, is general education helping to cultivate a free, explorative spirit, and creating an opening of the heart and mind of the students to connecting with each other, and to solving the world’s problems? 6 Does general education lead to the development of critical thinking and innovation capacity? How can we carve out rooms for students to form a renewed connection with nature and with other human beings? Looking at the level of a course, a school, a group of students, or a set of courses can give us some real and explicit ideas about how liberal arts education is being conceived, implemented or experimented on. The articles in this issue provide us a window to learn and think concretely about liberal arts education through a lens of general education in the United States and China.

Specifically, this issue contains five articles on general education and liberal arts education.

Article 1 by Jing Lin, Qian Meng and Xuan Weng looks at the case of general education at University of Maryland. In the wave of reform in general education to meet the challenges of the 21st century, American universities are restructuring their general education. Trying to maintain the liberal arts tradition while also being innovative, the University of Maryland has adopted new measures to provide students with opportunities to be explorative and socially engaged. The authors for example give an explanation of the newly instituted I-Series courses that focus on issues in the world and lead students to tackle big and major problems from disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. The range of the questions touched upon by these courses lead students to the forefront of exploration and the search for solutions of world issues. Students do not need to wait to later years in university education to think about these issues but they are exposed early on in their higher education, critically and innovatively. Further, students are presented with opportunities for social engagement. Gifted students are given opportunities to become researchers and explore frontier fields or socially important fields and issues. This article gives a picture of general education reform and innovation at the institutional level in the United States.

Jingjing Lou (Article 2) is an assistant professor at Beloit College, a liberal arts college in the Midwest of the United States. Reflecting on her teaching of a first year seminar, her article vividly and succinctly demonstrates how globalization provides an opportunity for her to bring Eastern perspectives into her teaching, while her students also gain the opportunity to benefit from a comparative understanding of Eastern and Western perspectives on ecological and community issues. Lou thoughtfully engages her students in Taoist, Confucianist and Buddhist perspectives on human-nature relationship, and the goal of her course as part of the general education curriculum is to render students to be aware and critical of ecological and other social problems local and global, to cultivate in students a concern for the world, and mostly to develop the capacity to work for improvement the world by taking actions. Integration of learning, being, and the capacity to serve the world is the goal of Junzi. Lou’s course gives us a concrete idea about how to go about educating such a person. The micro level analysis gives readers concrete ideas as to how to offer an authentic curriculum in liberal arts education.

Yung-Shan Huang and Shih-Fen Yeh’s article (Article 3) is critical of the practices in schools such as in Taiwan or Mainland China. She does not focus on a higher education setting, and she provides the example of a school in Taiwan that aims to educate a whole, engaging, living, intellectual and spiritual being. Huang has a deep understanding of the Taoist philosophy and she creatively integrates Taoist ideas in her reflection on the aesthetics of curriculum. She outlines a curriculum that leaves room for students to explore, that reveals the inner nature of children, that enables connections with nature and others, and finally that immerses the soul and spirit of the students in the learning process. Huang demonstrates that Taoism can bring refreshing understanding back to education as to what is to learn and how to learn. The idea of “remaining blank in the curriculum,” “aesthetic of simple and plain,” allowing “void”, “rest,” “emptiness,” “formlessness” and fluidity in curriculum is refreshing. These ideas allow for rejuvenation and creativity in the current environment which jams students with contents and which has an obsession with accountability and competitiveness. Many of her insights can be applied in the higher education setting in terms of what is the essence of a liberal arts education for an educated person.

Hong Zhu and Karen Arnold’s article (Article 4) examines student engagement in higher education in China, using a survey that involved 10 percent of the junior students in Beijing higher education institutions. They found that students’ extracurricular activities have the great impact on students’ learning, and that the matching of students’ interests and the major they study (referred to as “academic emotional engagement”) are two most important factors in students’ learning. Indeed, learning does not only take place in the classroom, especially when Chinese classrooms tend to be teacher centered, with little interaction between teachers and students. It is a combination of learning outside the classroom that students can “find themselves” or “be themselves.” Clubs, social events, . . . help students to be in touch with others as live beings, and they can exercise agency as an active person. The learning outside the classroom provides them perspectives on contents in the classroom and enhances educational gains. On another issue, liberal arts education values choices, yet many Chinese students enter universities without choices. Their parents or teachers forced them to major in some subjects that they have no interest in, and once in college, they seldom have opportunities to change their major. So lack of interests in what they need to learn is a major issue. Zhu and Arnold hold that matching students’ interest with their major is essential in educational gains. In the United States, students do not have to choose their major until the end of the second year, and they are given a wide range of courses to find out their interest. And even after they have decided on their majors, they still have the opportunity to change. Hence in adopting general education, Chinese universities need to also reform the admission process of having students to declare their major before they enroll. Other subsequent changes are also needed, such as the ease to switch major.

Article 5 by Manli Li and Yu Zhang studied three elite Chinese universities where general education is institutionalized. They investigate the impacts of student background and extracurricular activities on student performance measured from the perspective of general education objectives, i.e., critical thinking, creativity, value judgment, decision-making, and communication skill. Gender, social class and talents in arts are found to have an impact on the outcome of general education for the students.

One of the goals of general education is the development of critical thinking, at least since the mid-1980s, American universities have reiterated it as an important ability. Joseph Jiang (Article 6) examines the challenges to the cultivation of critical thinking in general education China. Upon examination of the composition of curriculum for undergraduate students and the classroom learning dynamics, he pinpoints that the political system in China emphasizes control over freedom of exploration, hence limiting the possibility of critical thinking for faculty and students. He concludes that although general education is being experimented on or being implemented in some Chinese universities, the students have not developed critical thinking ability, as the cultural, political and institutional supports are not attainable.

In summary, all the authors on general education in China point out that in China, insufficient attention has been paid to general education. First, learning is very much for jobs, and this contradicts with the broad goals of liberal arts education. Secondly, the focus on research rather than on teaching in faculty evaluation has downplayed the importance of general education. Thirdly, leaders, administrators and student affairs staff have not collaborated or coordinated their efforts in students’ holistic learning and development.

On another front, included in this issue are also two articles, not focusing on general education but inclusive of it, which can bring other dimensions into our examination of general and liberal arts education. They provide the contexts of globalization featured by ranking and competiveness, but mediated by a country’s institutional equalitarian context (Canada) and by a cultural tradition that embraces mass higher education while preserving the symbolic prestige of elitism in higher education.

Article 7 by Qiang Zha from York University in Canada reminds us that general education or not, globally, there seems to be an unstoppable trend among universities to drive for ranking and prestige, and “excellence” is conceived as having a competitive edge over others. But we must not forget there are many people who are still very disadvantaged, that the world is diverse and that egalitarianism, although it may be seen as illusive, is still a form of ultimate excellence in higher education. The article by Zha looks at how Canadian Universities are able to maintain the pursuit for an egalitarian system despite the trend for differentiation and competition. He uses very concrete data and explicit arguments to show that an outstanding higher education system does not have to be for some privileged group of people while others are neglected or short-changed. Canada presents a sober example for China and the United States where the overwhelming stress on ranking is prevalent.

Article 8 by Tien-Hui Chiang discusses the rise of neo-liberalism which justifies free market and privatization as the dominant values that lead to globalization and a knowledge based economy. This major change in paradigm shifts higher education from elite-oriented to mass higher education. Taiwan has voluntarily joined this trend and opened doors for private universities to grow and enroll students even in those fields that were strictly government’s domains, such as teaching training. The dramatic expansion in higher education leads to oversupply in higher education, however the value of a university degree has not been reduced, as Confucian culture and a Taiwan culture are still strongly in play, that is, higher learning can lead to glory for the family. The symbolic meaning of receiving higher education has been sustained for the respect for the literati, and this has sustained the prestige of higher education despite the great expansion.

In conclusion, authors in this special issue raise some interesting points for general education. While general education continues to evolve in the United States, it is finding its way into Chinese universities. However, Chinese universities may have installed courses and set up honor’s colleges, the culture of valuing liberal arts education is still to be cultivated. Students in Chinese universities are placed in the bottom tier of the higher education hierarchy, and they are seldom viewed and treated as people of agency, hence choices, individual interests, participation, interaction, explorative learning and critical thinking are still largely not the norm in Chinese higher education hence the support for general education is very much lacking.

How should general education be provided in the United States and China? In the globalization era, there are a lot of mutual learning to take place and a lot of challenges to overcome. The articles in this issue gives us a glimpse of the changes in higher education in the United States, China, Canada and Taiwan under the influence of globalization, and specifically on what is being experimented on in general education. The articles indicate that there can be mutual learning between the East and the West. Training skilled labors while maintaining the dream of education for an “educated” person remains a tough task of balance, and this editor believes general education curriculum of the 21st century requires a revival of past wisdoms on education and the continuous efforts by institutions and individuals to innovate teaching and learning to deal with many serious challenges and problems in our world. After all, an “educated person” is to serve a “Common World”, a world of equality and justice, of wisdom seeking and virtue cultivating so central for Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Lao Zi and all the great beings of the human race, and which is still very much true for our world today.