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Liberal Education as Adulthood: A View from U.S.–China Dialogue

This essay is on liberal education as a medium for the cultivation of the expanded understanding of “adulthood” so urgently required in order to address the problems we face in the global era. It argues that one element of cultivation is the reappropriation of the traditional resources oriented to this task that were so enthusiastically dismissed in the rush of modernization and, further, that this reappropriation can avoid fundamentalism and/or reactionary movements when it is conducted in dialogue with persons from other cultures who are engaging the same task. This essay, then, reports on dialogical reappropriation as it is occurring between Western Greek and Chinese Confucian traditions. It also discusses the dynamics of education as transformative practice and the challenges to education so understood in an era of accountability through metrics and managerial science—while we wait for the emergence of a more sophisticated orientation to value, efficacy, and development.