Nurture Over Nature: A Reflective Review of Confucian Philosophy on Learning and Talented Performance

Abstract

Achieving talented performance (TP) is a crucial concern at every level of education. In retrospect, while examining the Western cultural tradition of education and learning to as far back as the ancient Greeks, it is not difficult to find that nature vs. nurture, or innate ability vs. acquired ability have been long-term controversial issues. Perhaps due to the influence of Plato, who held a form of rationalism that maintained that all real knowledge was innate, and Aristotle, who held that the defining characteristics of things reflected something essential about them — their essence — views proclaiming the importance of innate ability have been significantly popular in the West for many years, and are still prevalent in most Western countries and societies (Wu, 2005). The literature on this point in China, however, both traditionally and currently, seems to be far more sympathetic to the importance of nurture rather than nature, which might reasonably be attributed to the profound influence of Confucian philosophy on theories of learning and achieving. This paper presents a reflective review of this philosophy, examines its influence in China and some other Asian countries, and discusses some of its implications for the education of gifted and talented children.