International Journal of Chinese Education

Debates about higher education’s purpose have long been polarized between specialized preparation for specific vocations and a broad, general knowledge foundation known as liberal education. Excluding the United States, specialized curricula have been the dominant global norm. Yet, quite surprisingly given this enduring trend, liberal education has new salience in higher education worldwide. This discussion presents liberal education’s non-Western, Western, and u.s. historical roots as a backdrop for discussing its contemporary global resurgence. Analysis from the Global Liberal Education Inventory provides an overview of liberal education’s renewed presence in each of the regions and speculation about its future development.

In recent years general education in Chinese universities has gone through rapid growth, which has led scholars to reflect on the motivations which underpin its current and future development. This paper establishes a framework based on the size of the universities together with whether the motivation is idealism or empiricism. This framework forms three typologies of general education in China, particularly from the perspective of curriculum design and student involvement. Three cases that each represent one of the three typologies are analyzed to depict the detailed characteristics. The main conclusion of the paper is that general education in its essence is an idealistic pursuit of a permanent goal, while in reality it is resource-dependent and rooted in historical conditions. China’s case studies provide a vivid example that general education reform starts with practical approaches of offering selective courses or building pilot zones and then by moderately increasing its scale and coverage, moving towards idealism across the spectrum. The key principals during the long journey are to avoid conformism, encourage innovations and maintain diversity.

In the context of internationalization of higher education in China, this essay analyzes some inherent differences between the stem disciplines and humanities disciplines when it comes to the internationalization of curriculum and implementation. With a focus on the challenges facing the internationalization of the liberal arts, or humanities disciplines, a functional 3M model, that is, the internationalization of “Mind,” “Method,” and “Medium”, was proposed to address different aspects of the internationalization process. Moreover, we proposed multiple strategies that could possibly promote the professional development of faculty members along the three specific dimensions, aligning the strategies with the working definitions within each dimension of the 3M model.

Being the first full scale cooperation in higher education between the Mainland and Hong Kong, the United International College (uic) positioned itself as “A New liberal Arts College” to help the country diversify her higher education landscape as part of education reform. While attempting to retain the defining characteristics of a us-style liberal arts college—caring for students, small class sizes, broad based curricula, facilitating cross fertilization of ideas, uic strongly emphasizes Chinese traditional culture, literature, history and Chinese thoughts through the ages, in addition to helping students acquire an international outlook. This is deemed essential not only because the students should learn about their own cultural heritage, but also they should treasure the wisdom of traditional Chinese thinking that could lend a helping hand to solving many problems the world faces today. It is gratifying to see that, after 10 years’ experimentation, the traditional western liberal arts education could be realized in the Chinese traditional culture context. In particular, the Confucius education philosophy could help nurture the whole person—junzi (君子), which is the overarching education goal of uic.

This essay investigates the need for and the challenges associated with the establishment of western style liberal arts education in a non-western nation. Two such programs in Japan are examined: Akita International University and Yamanashi Gakuin University’s International College of Liberal Arts or iCLA. The authors have been deeply involved in the establishment and administration of both of these all-English language liberal arts ba degree programs. The difficulty of establishing a liberal arts education curriculum in a country like Japan is explored by examining the cultural and institutional obstacles within the Japanese system of higher education. The two case studies are presented to highlight the establishment problems and subsequent successes of these programs in a nation with little tradition of liberal arts education at the university level. Finally, the questions of how to justify a liberal arts education program and how to design such a program are discussed by an examination of the utility of area studies as an organizing framework for liberal arts education in a non-western society.

Liberal arts schools and university programs are flourishing in India. Over the past decade economic growth and the ability to pay for education have spurred the creation of private and public liberal arts schools. As internationalization of higher education and cross-border movements of students become increasingly more common, a new generation of students is now familiar with global education and corresponding western pedagogies. Along with the increase in study abroad programs is the rise in demand for quality liberal arts institutions at home. This study of O.P. Jindal Global University, founded in 2007, and the Jindal School of Liberal Arts and Humanities (jslh) examines the contradictions and challenges inherent in supplanting long-held traditional teaching methods and classroom culture with the western concept of liberal education. The jslh faculty consists of Indian and foreign instructors while all students are Indian. Applying qualitative research methods of direct observation, interviews with faculty and students and surveys, the author examines changes in the traditional classroom power dynamics and the acceptance and resistance to new pedagogies. One strategy for addressing challenges, such as the faculty’s resistance to change was through in-depth discussion among faculty of the merits and limitations of traditional education and experiential learning. Foreign faculty benefitted from co-teaching with Indian faculty as all parties made a conscious effort to recognize cultural differences in student-teacher relations.

When are the most appropriate times to receive a liberal arts and sciences education? The liberal arts and sciences model is meant to achieve aims that include general cognitive abilities, moral and social growth, and interdisciplinary understanding. This paper considers the case for studying the liberal arts and sciences in secondary school in comparison with studying them in college/university. Success in fostering cognitive skills such as critical thinking is used as a basis for comparison of these two settings. A review of empirical research suggests that general cognitive gains are not unique to the liberal arts and sciences nor to tertiary education, but that social and moral education may constitute a more unique advantage of the liberal arts. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications for the justification of the liberal arts and sciences in China.