Abstract
After absorbing Western knowledge for at least one and a half centuries, East Asian higher education has made some remarkable achievements in recent decades. Throughout the region, a Western-styled higher education system has been well established. The region has become the world’s third great zone of higher education, science, and innovation, alongside North America and Western Europe/UK, with research powerhouses, and the fastest growth in scientific output. While East Asia’s achievement has been widely acknowledged, assessment of its future development is not. The strikingly contrastive assessments among scholars are often due to their perspectives employed consciously and unconsciously in their research. This chapter attempts to delve deeply into the theorization of perspectives for observing higher education development in East Asia. After some methodological inquiries into research perspective and frames of reference, it critiques the current English literature and calls for multiple perspectives for studying East Asian higher education. It concludes that current conceptualization of East Asian higher education development relies almost entirely on Western theoretical constructions and argues that the perspectives that give weight to the impact of traditional East Asian ways of cultural thinking on contemporary development are badly needed.
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Notes
- 1.
Today, Chinese students continue to recite the definition: “Matter is a philosophical category denoting the objective reality which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them” (Lenin 1962, p.130).
- 2.
The Chinese original is 苏轼,《题西林壁》:横看成岭侧成峰, 远近高低各不同。不识庐山真面目,只缘身在此山中。
- 3.
Yang Kuo-shu is a professor of psychology at the National Taiwan University. He received his PhD from the University of Illinois and has since published on psychology and behaviors of Chinese people, personality psychology, and social psychology.
- 4.
It is important to point out that with recent remarkable social development in major East Asian societies, a small number of (usually the best) local researchers have started to become more confident. At the same time, and quite unfortunately, there have been some signs of dangerous academic nationalism.
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Yang, R. (2018). Foil to the West? Interrogating Perspectives for Observing East Asian Higher Education. In: Jung, J., Horta, H., Yonezawa, A. (eds) Researching Higher Education in Asia. Higher Education in Asia: Quality, Excellence and Governance. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-4989-7_3
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