When Confucianism meets Ubuntu: Rediscovering justice, morality and practicality for education and development

Abstract

The ideal of Ubuntu ushers to a humanistic re-orientation for education and development in a critical time, when neo-liberal ideology is bearing fruit in educational standardization, managerialism, commercialization, competitiveness, and more pervasively, modernization and globalization, all dominated by the hegemony of a global capitalist system. Since the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century, capitalism has aggressively extended its visible and invisible tentacles to almost all aspects of human life around the globe and globalization has amplified its reach under post-colonial conditions. It is a critical time, a time when we must interrogate our educational realities, which have too long been ideologically distorted, systematically de-humanized and instrumentalized in ways that serve the global dominance of advantaged groups or societies. This is evident worldwide in the increasing polarization between the masses and a few elites, South and North, in recent decades. What was originally a multi-faceted mission of education for human beings has been reduced, institutionally, to a largely technical exercise, oftentimes in the questionable form of economic returns, skills training, credentialism, performance-oriented policies, or/and global ranking of quantifiable achievements, such as the ongoing movement paved with the OECD Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Unfortunately, humanistic education has a doubtful future, and excellence without a soul has been widely observed in our realities of education across institutions in various contexts (Lewis, 2007). <Abstract from author>