Oriental Pedagogy
The ideal of a leveling Oriental pedagogy
expressed through government schooling was promoted by Jacobin orators
of the French National Convention in the early 1790s, the commencement
years of our own republic. The notion of forced schooling was
irresistible to French radicals, an enthusiasm whose foundation had been
laid in preceding centuries by utopian writers like Harrington (Oceania), More (Utopia), Bacon (New Atlantis), Campanella (City of the Sun),
and in other speculative fantasy embracing the fate of children.
Cultivating a collective social organism was considered the ingredient
missing from feudal society, an ingredient which would allow the West
the harmony and stability of the East.
Utopian schooling is never about learning in
the traditional sense; it’s about the transformation of human nature.
The core of the difference between Occident and Orient lies in the power
relationship between privileged and ordinary, and in respective
outlooks on human nature. In the West, a metaphorical table is spread by
society; the student decides how much to eat; in the East, the teacher
makes that decision. The Chinese character for school shows a passive
child with adult hands pouring knowledge into his empty head.
To mandate outcomes centrally would be a
major step in the destruction of Western identity. Management by
objectives, whatever those objectives might be, is a technique of
corporate subordination, not of education. Like Alfred’s, Charlemagne’s
awareness of Asia was sharpened in mortal combat. He was the first
secular Western potentate to beat the drum for secular schooling. It was
easy to ignore Plato’s gloomy forecast that however attractive utopia
appears in imagination, human nature will not live easily with the
degree of synthetic constraint it requires.
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