Modernity and Education

Abstract

Modernity, and its modern institutions, represented cultural continuity for Europe, but profound cultural discontinuity for Japan. Atop an already-existing cultural, religious, social, philosophical, and ecological - these very terms needing to be forged in Japanese to understand European modernity - milieu were placed modern institutions, all of which were predicated on core European ontological assumptions about self, knowledge, history, nature, and world. During the first two decades, the ‘importing’ of modernity into Japan was largely done without awareness of these assumptions. Thereafter, the differences became visible and problematized. Perhaps more accurately: entanglement with European modernity helped make visible an already-existing, yet different, ontological milieu. Amid myriad attempts to deal with this general disjuncture - some leading to nostalgic nationalism, others charging headlong into wholesale Westernization - one of the most fascinating philosophical developments in modern Japan was the rise of a sustained, and still flourishing, attempt to refound European modernity on this alternative ontology: various Japanese thinkers developed highly creative (re)articulations of the core premises of European modernity. This intellectual legacy lives on, unfolding itself in contemporary educational philosophy, theory, and practice to this day. Around this central story, this chapter suggests that one path to renewing the East-West dialogue in education is to place this (re)interpretation of modernity’s foundational ideas at the centre of the dialogue. Including modernity - a historical-cultural-contextual category - moves the discussion beyond textual exegesis, a shift that is imperative as educational research is now dominated less by ideas, more by the empirical, here-and-now concerns of contemporary schooling. To accomplish this, the chapter opens with a discussion of how modernity has been understood in mainstream Western thought (Section ‘How to understand modernity I? Two critical Western approaches’), and then turn to suggest an alternative approach (Section ‘How to understand modernity II? A non-Western approach’). This is followed by an elaboration of an alternative background to modern Japanese society (Section ‘A focus on the background: Japan’s modernity (self, knowledge, time, nature, world)'), and then a discussion of the educational implications (Section ‘Manabi contextualized, or why manabi is not equivalent to “learning”'). In conclusion (Section ‘Conclusion: An East-West philosophical dialogue in a manabi mode?'), it returns to the discussion on how to further dialogue between East and West in education.