Liberal Arts in the universities of Greater China: Current Models and the Historical Legacy
- Ruth Hayhoe, University of Toronto, Canada
- Leping Mou, University of Toronto, Canada
- Qiang Zha, York University, Canada
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The liberal arts are usually regarded as a legacy from the Greek and Roman classics, adapted in American universities, with little awareness of their deep roots in Confucian heritage education. In this webinar Ruth Hayhoe will begin with an introduction to the liberal arts in Chinese Christian universities of the late 19th and early 20th centuries where Chinese classical scholars cooperated with North American missionaries in creating campuses characterized by a rich flow of ideas and architectural patterns rooted in China’s traditions. Although these institutions were closed 70 years ago, historians and philosophers in China are still publishing research on their legacy today! The second speaker, Leping Mou, will present three current models of the liberal arts in universities in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Mainland China, showing how each has built on this inheritance in a distinctive context. The last speaker, Qiang Zha, will discuss the possibility of reimagining Confucian humanism through the lens of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which in turn serves to rephrase the Confucian canons in a universal language.
CGHE webinars are fully open to participants. They are interactive, enabling attendees to speak directly in the webinar, ask questions of speakers when called in by the chair and see all other participants. At any time you can communicate directly with others, either all together or on a one-to-one basis, through the webinar Chat.
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Ruth Hayhoe is a professor at the University of Toronto. She served as Cultural Secretary in the Canadian Embassy in Beijing (1989-1991), and Director of the Hong Kong Institute of Education, now the Education University of Hong Kong (1997-2002). Recent books include China Through the Lens of Comparative Education (2015), Canadian Universities in China’s Transformation (2016) and Religion and Education (2018).
Leping Mou is a PhD Candidate at OISE, University of Toronto and lecturer at University of Toronto Mississauga. His doctoral research examines liberal arts education for whole person cultivation in Chinese contexts. He serves as the Co-Chair for the Canadian Society for the Study of Higher Education 2022 Annual Conference.
Qiang Zha is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education, York University, Toronto, Canada, and currently a York University Provostial Fellow. His research interests include liberal arts education in East Asia, and his most recent publication on this topic appeared in Educational Philosophy and Theory in 2021, titled ‘How should liberal arts education evolve in the twenty first century? An exploration of universities in China and beyond’.
