Reimagining Modern Education: Contributions from Modern Japanese Philosophy and Practice?

Abstract

Purpose: Amidst ongoing attempts to think beyond Western frameworks for education, there is a tendency to overlook Japan, perhaps because it appears highly modern. This is striking given that some prominent strands of Japanese philosophy have formulated an explicit and exacting challenge to the core onto-epistemic premises of modern Western thought. It is also surprising because Japanese educational practices have resulted in some of the highest achievement outcomes-both cognitive and noncognitive-found anywhere in the world and inculcate a worldview that is distinct.Design/Approach/Methods: Herein, we thus attempt to make visible the potential contribution of modern Japanese philosophy by outlining some of the core ideas, then turn to sketch resonances with and responses to other projects outlined in this Special Issue. Our approach is elucidation through relational comparison.Findings: Through this process, we suggest that the notion of self-negation as a mode of learning may be helpful in explaining why-at the empirical level-the outlook of Japanese students, and perhaps other East Asian students, diverge markedly from their Western peers. Yet we also find that an attempt, such as ours, to link divergent onto-epistemic thought to alternative empirical hypotheses quickly gives rise to various doubts and discomforts, even among otherwise sympathetic scholars.

Engaging with the More-Than-Human and Decolonial Turns in the Land of Shinto Cosmologies: “Negative” Comparative Education in Practice

“…I have come to see that the nationalist political discourse offers a more radical critique of the Western modernity and its political and pedagogic discourse. Infusing the Shinto cosmologies into Japanese school curriculum might help extend different onto-epistemic premises of Japanese schooling that some international scholars identify as a viable alternative to those of Western schooling (e.g., Komatsu & Rappleye, 2017; see also Komatsu & Rappleye, 2020). Paradoxically, 58 ECNU Review of Education 3(1) some nationalists whom I have always thought to be politically conservative were pursuing a form of decolonial, as opposed to de-westernization, project in that they refuse to accept the fundamental premises of modern schooling, reason, and rationality and insist on the localized-as opposed to local-differences.…”

“…Through self-cultivation, one learns to be one with an object (flowers, stones, and trees); it is a state of nothingness where one comes to know a thing not through reason and language but through intuitions developed through direct experience. The same worldview is now recognized as a part of the broader East Asian cosmology, juxtaposed against what is putatively Western (see Komatsu & Rappleye, 2020). Here, the Shinto animism and the body of thought developed out of it are mobilized to relativize the very ontology and epistemology of Western thoughts often received as “universal.”…”

Toward Weaving a “Common Faith” in the Age of Climate Change

“…More specifically, the concept of no-self in Buddhism is not a rejection of self, that is, no-self is not a lack of self. Rather, from the standpoint of Buddhism, the putative self “is a dynamic karmic continuity rather than an essential ontological substantiality—an ongoing process rather than an underlying thing” (Sponberg, 1997; see also Komatsu & Rappley, 2020). It follows that the embodied “self” is “nothing more or less than the dynamic aggregation of a bundle of interrelated causal processes” (Sponberg, 1997).…”

Beyond the Western Horizon in Educational Research: Toward a Deeper Dialogue About Our Interdependent Futures

“…Komatsu and Rappleye (2020) initiate the Special Issue with their piece entitled “Reimagining Modern Education: Contributions from Modern Japanese Philosophy and Practice?” They suggest that within the wider Decolonial and Spiritual (ontological) trajectories, there has been a tendency to overlook thought and practice found in Japan, perhaps because on the surface it looks highly modern and was not formally colonized (and indeed became a colonial power for a time). But they challenge us to recognize that modern Japanese philosophy has explicitly challenged—in a decolonial sense—the core ontological and epistemic premises of modern Western thought, while Japanese educational practices are clearly distinct in many ways.…”