Chinese Schools ~ “education and ideology” series, Part 1/3
Is it possible for children to emerge from Chinese schools as sceptical questioners of historical facts?
Part 1 of 3
This question relates closely to the broader issue of the process of human existential growth: how our understanding of the world is shaped and continuously altered by physical, emotional and cognitive experiences. In order to answer the question of whether ‘sceptical questioners’ can emerge from contemporary Chinese schools, one must first address the problem of adequately defining what a sceptical questioner actually is. Similarly, before claiming whether or not historical facts are the subject of sceptical questioning, one must first ask: what is the definition of ‘Historical Fact’? These two steps are crucial to any coherent, qualified understanding of education in terms of how intellectual autonomy may be cultivated, and whether the cultivation of such a quality automatically renders an individual a sceptical questioner – moreover, a questioner of Historical Facts as represented in educational institutions.
How one ends up discussing a topic such as this depends greatly upon the ideological positioning of the writer in relation to the notion of ‘Knowable Truth’. At its core this question consists in epistemic debates and the tensions that surround them. Some would argue that reasoning about the past is always caught up with the prevailing problem of retrospective subjectivity, and that objectivity in such cirumstances is frankly unattainable. By this logic, one perspective on a so-called ‘historical fact’ is as valid as any other. But this brand of pessimistic – and quite unhelpful – epistemology will get us nowhere fast. Is it better perhaps to set the perameters of a working definition and move on from there…
In light of this, I propose that a working definition of ‘scepticism’ should incorporate the trait of refraining from making truth-claims; an intellectual outlook that strives for objectivity in value-judgements, and whereby absolute concepts of truth and falsity are held to be unreliable foundations from which to draw conclusions. In practice, the process of sceptical questioning ought to include the ability to employ a good degree of critical detachment from issues under consideration – to work only with the ‘given’ first principles of any ‘given’ problem, and to not resort to the illogic of a biased perspective. It is an (Enlightenment) intellectual ideal that is in itself an impossibility to fully realise; the most any aspiring sceptical questioner can hope for is a stoical awareness of his/ her own discursive positioning and the social, cultural and personal narratives that inform this position. ‘Historical Fact’ is a similarly problematical term to define as it has strong connotations – not only with the static nature of empirical events, but also with the solidity of a given interpretation/ representation of those events, which is not conducive to sceptical thinking.
Moving to the case of Chinese institutional education: does indoctrination into this system cultivate or curtail the capacity to question sceptically the historical ‘facts’ schools teach, and how they are taught?
