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Portraits of influential Chinese educators, edited by Ruth Hayhoe

In Portraits of Influential Chinese Educators, Ruth Hayhoe portrays 11 Chinese contemporary educators as researchers, university administrators and practitioners whose ideas have shaped the educational reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978. Using a narrative approach that describes the 11 educators’ life stories – their cultural heritage, families, schools, and communities – the book provides a vivid picture of China’s educational development in the twentieth century from an insider’s perspective. According to the author, the primary purpose of the book is to make an account of the contemporary Chinese educators who lived through the dramatic changes of the twentieth century but still ‘remained true to their calling’ (p. 1). The author believes that their own lives and educational ideas embody valuable aspects of their Confucian heritage and could offer a unique contribution to the global dialogue between diverse civilizations. Therefore, this book aims to communicate with comparative researchers who take culture as an important factor in comparison. The book starts with an introduction to the Confucian intellectual tradition and the utility of narrative as a method to discover these educators’ lives. Each of the following chapters offers a biography of these 11 educators, including two of the major figures in China’s Comparative Education – Wang Chengxu and Gu Mingyuan – as well as major names in other fields of education. The story-telling is primarily based on interviews the author conducted with the educators themselves over the course of numerous field visits. Each chapter prefaces its bibliographic narrative with a description of the educational institution with which the individual is affiliated. The concluding chapter of the book consists of comparative reflections on the life experiences and the major educational ideas of the eleven educators. The author indicates a strong trend among these educators: nearly all of them are taking on the challenge of balancing individual development against the demands of family, community and schools, as well as tensions between freedom and responsibility. Confucian traditions did not restrict these scholars to rigid social rules but they did receive a rich understanding of the need to seek a balance. This balance is extremely hard to achieve in the historical context of deprivation and political restriction. The author believes that the wisdom and tremendous efforts these educators made are a valuable lesson for understanding the development of the individual as the realization of a communal vision of self, of which the Western society may lack. Another interesting finding of this multi-biography is the diversity of experiences of each educator due to the dramatic change of Chinese society in the last century. The variety of different educational systems within which these scholars studied and taught – including the Japanese, American, Soviet, and Maoist models – provide a rich experience that informed their educational philosophies, enabling them to independently reach an Compare Vol. 38, No. 3, June 2008, 373–375