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The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education pp 113–126Cite as

Confucianism, Compassion (Ren) and Higher Education: A Perspective from the Analects of Confucius

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Abstract

Confucius was a renowned sage and philosopher of China, and Confucianism is one of the significant thought systems which has influenced profoundly traditional Chinese culture for centuries. In this chapter, the author outlines briefly the relationship between Confucianism and education and reviews Confucius’s compassion as learned from the Analects of Confucius. In particular, from the perspective of Confucianism, he finds that contemporary higher education is utilitarian and in lack of sufficient moral awareness. Without compassion, higher educational institutes may only work mechanically and financially. He suggests that Confucius’s teachings are not outdated but modern and discusses the implications of the Confucian compassion for contemporary higher education. He advocates reconstructing compassionate higher education in daily practices and transforming higher education into compassionate higher education.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    With B. Yang as the interpreter (from ancient to contemporary Chinese) and D.C. Lau as the translator (from ancient Chinese to English).

  2. 2.

    Shijing 詩經 in Chinese. There are different translations of the Oldes in English, e.g. the Book of Songs (e.g. trans. Waley 1996) and the Book of Poetry (e.g. Zhang 1987).

  3. 3.

    The ‘meat’ in this statement did not mean Confucius was materialistic, but represented a custom in Confucius ’s time to show students’ sincerity, where a student would send a gift to a potential teacher with whom he would like to study when they first met; in fact, a number of Confucius’s students came from grass roots and poor families (Cao and Turner 2015: 172).

  4. 4.

    D.C. Lau, a renowned translator of the Analects, was of the opinion that this sentence has a high chance of having been corrupted, and the negative is likely an interpolation. Lau suggested that its true meaning is as follows: ‘Poverty and low station are what men dislike, but if I got them in the right way I would not try to take myself away from them ’. See Confucius (2008: 53, Book 4: 5, Remark 1).

  5. 5.

    Xue (學) in the original text of the statement does not mean ‘learning’ alone but ‘learning as personal growth’ (Ames 2011: 162).

  6. 6.

    Examples include the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948, Article 26(1)), the Convention against Discrimination in Education (1960, Preamble) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966, Article 13).

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  1. Middlesex University, London, UK

    Kar-wai Tong

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    Paul Gibbs

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Tong, Kw. (2017). Confucianism, Compassion (Ren) and Higher Education: A Perspective from the Analects of Confucius . In: Gibbs, P. (eds) The Pedagogy of Compassion at the Heart of Higher Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57783-8_8

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