傳統文化 및 儒敎敎育의 활성화

Abstract

In the West, ‘Education’ aims at activities for acquiring various types of knowledge through reasonable thinking. From the viewpoint of Western modern capitalism, education enhances the educated persons’ labor value and provides them with conditions for better life in the course of entering into a new world. In this sense, educators play the roles of only delivering knowledge and information through reasonable thinking and assisting students with their potential for growth as much as possible. Then what meanings does our traditional education have? ‘Traditional education’ is limited to Confucian education that has made its accomplishments through Confucian customs over thousands of years. In education pursued by Confucianism, the expansion of reasonable knowledge is also important but there are preconditions for that. It is ‘realization’ obtained from the students’ own experiences and feelings in the course of life maintaining relations with others. It is not deniable that humans are social beings by nature. The Western term ‘person’ implies extreme individuality. When ‘person’ is translated into a Chinese term, it is expressed as ‘Ingan (人間)’ in the region of Confucian culture like us. ‘Gan (間)’ contains the meaning that attaches a high value to relations with others than to individuality. Accordingly, ‘study,’ ‘learning’ or ‘education’ is a series of processes executed in the relation between ‘I’ and ‘others.’ Etymologically, ‘study (Gongbu:工夫)’ was originally ‘Gongbu (功扶),’ which means all kinds of acts applicable and helpful to the process of achieving ‘merits.’ That is, the objective of education in traditional Confucianism is the restoration of human nature, and the process of restoration is teaching and learning. That is, it was all of education to restore the supreme ideal humanity like a saint. ‘The saint and man of virtue’ pursued by traditional Confucianism was a person who identifies himself with Heaven [Nature] through continuous reflection on his inner world and extension of his outer world, and this is the ground of Confucian education. The ultimate destination of Confucian education is the state of oneness between Heaven and the self, in which ‘natural rules’ conform to ‘moral rules,’ by attributing natural rules as unchanging norms to saints and endowing humans with moral rules as their everyday precepts to follow. Accordingly, the present study reviews the nature of Confucian education originating from Saint Confucius and discusses today’s necessity of education on traditional culture and Confucianism. Furthermore, we survey and analyze current education on traditional culture and Confucianism in institutional elementary and secondary curriculums as well as in non‐institutional lifelong education centers and organizations, and based on the results, approach how to activate traditional Confucian education in the future from three aspects, which are moral character education, etiquette education, and scripture (Chinese literature and character) education.