In 1932, with the help of the League of Nations, the Chinese government sent an educational mission consisting of five scholars to Europe, in order to investigate education in different countries as reference points for ongoing Chinese educational reform. This article argues that educators in the mission used foreign examples to support their…

The nature of the New Policies in China (1901-1911) has been hotly debated for decades. While scholars doubt the sincerity of the Qing government in their pursuit of constitutional reform, there is a general agreement on the high quality of their educational reform. Some even consider their educational innovations as "genuine reform" but…

The thought on nature education plays an important role in both Eastern and Western history of educational thoughts. However, the rich thought on nature education in Pre-Qin Taoism in China was little-known in Western academia. Chuang Tzu was the co-founder and one of the main representative figures of Pre-Qin Taoism philosophy and nature…

In this article, we delve into the characterisation of international students as "Confucian Heritage" learners. To appreciate the implications of such iterative interpellation, we develop a genealogy of Sinology, which is here approached as the discursive effect of a colonial epistemic division of the world into free and democratic West…

History curriculum and textbooks, as a key mechanism of constructing collective memory, play a critical role in shaping national, social, and cultural imaginations of the young. This paper analyses history textbooks in Taiwan during the martial law period (1950-1987) to explore narratives about Taiwan and examines the ways in which those…

This paper investigates the transformation in the Zhou dynasty China (1046-256 BC) of the concept of education in relation to the process of social selection, which concerns the distribution both of knowledge and of social ranks. An approach in terms of historical semantics, mainly influenced by Luhmannian sociological theory with some reference…

Using a transnational framework, this paper focuses on four graduates of Gipsy Hill Training College (GHTC) for nursery school teachers in London, United Kingdom, in the early to mid-twentieth century. Firstly, I explore GHTC's progressive ideals and highlight ways in which its principal, Lillian de Lissa, encouraged students to "think…