To browse Academia. As such, critical thinking has become a product that can be bought, sold or even stolenββjust like its traditional breeding ground, namely institutionalized education. It may thus be time to mourn the loss of the critical mind, and so mark the sad end of a certain kind of education, one which gave a key place to the humanities.
However, instead of grieving for such losses and memorializing the end of the European subject, who has obviously lost his free will in the whirlwind of the all-embracing market economy, and sadly died in front of the barbed-wire fences defending his homeland from thousands of unarmed, weakened, starving and freezing refugees, we are searching for alternatives. As such, we present in this issue another kind of education. Admittedly, the values Confucian education aimed to foster did not include much absolute independence, but it still laid emphasis on autonomous critical thinking and genuine humaneness.
While many believe that Confucianism is incompatible with the critical mind and personal autonomy, this issue aims to show that this wide-spread prejudice is rooted in a lack of knowledge. The most common image of Confucianism is that it was advocating a strict, rigid and hierarchically structured society based on the absolute obedience of those at the subordinate levels of the system, and, analogously, on absolute power of their superiors.
However, we would like to present another Picture of Confucian education, one that is more academically justified and closer to the truth. It is important to recall that this model was originally, and especially in the classical Confucian teachings, rooted in the principles of complementarity and reciprocal responsibility.
We must not forget that hierarchic structures are also present in Western democratic systems, and most importantly, authority based on experience, knowledge and abilities is not necessarily a negative ideal, or a threat to individual autonomy. The Confucian classics stress the important role of ideational and axiological elements, like rituality, relational ethics, the virtues of humaneness and justice, and the crucial role of education as a basic means of cultivating and thus improving inborn humaneness in order to achieve progress and social development.
