In this paper, Leonard Waks investigates connections between listening and expertise or mastery, contrasting approaches from Eastern and Western philosophy. The first section accounts for listening in the Daoist classic "Zhuangzi", a work addressing themes in Chinese philosophy through metaphor and story narratives. In one story a…

Over the past twenty-five years, homeschooling has been growing in popularity. Conventionally, the actions of homeschoolers are understood as a rejection of the public school -- and, by extension, a rejection of participation in the public sphere writ large. Yet such interpretations are made without due attention to the meaning of both…

In this essay David Black claims that, if one pieces together the many sketches of educational decorum found in the Confucian "Analects," one will discover three types of misguided student; that is, one will come to recognize that Confucius admonishes three types of insensitive learners who, due to the lure of personal advantage and…

In this essay Charlene Tan offers a philosophical analysis of the Singapore state's vision of shared citizenship by examining it from a Confucian perspective. The state's vision, known formally as "Our Shared Values," consists of communitarian values that reflect the official ideology of multiculturalism. This initiative included a White…

The postmodern critique of modernity has focused on the construction of the modern subject and the self-disciplining and self-cancellation tendencies within it. This critique, however, fails to consider what happens during the early years of children's development--the period during which the modern subject is made, and the one in which the…