"Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application?" Confucius

I feel so completely overwhelmed with opportunities to learn this Fall that I am feeling a little giddy at the moment with all the excitement of the interactions. My heart is full and brimming with a sense of expansive gratitude. The most exciting soures of learning really are my wonderful "students" this semester who are my greatest teachers.

In the recent couple of weeks I have also been invited to attend several other exciting events.

Last week I was invited to the opening ceremony of the Confucius Institute at the university where I teach. There were uplifting speeches by the President of the university and the Consul General of the PRC consulate in New York who both spoke of the coming together of peoples from different nations in the world and the relevance of Confucius' doctrine of harmony for the relationships between nations in an emerging global society.

We were even treated to an up close and personal performance of a Lion Dance. Very fun. (Not sure why they turned off the lights!)

From the Wikipedia entry on the Confucius Institute "The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China estimates that, by the year 2010, there will be approximately 100 million people worldwide learning Chinese as a foreign language, and it plans to set up more than 100 Confucius Institutes worldwide."

The most important Confucian classic is The Analects. Here are the comments about this book on Google books:

"No other book in the entire history of the world has exerted a greater influence on a larger number of people over a longer period of time than this slim volume. The spiritual cornerstone of the most populous and oldest living civilization on Earth, the Analects has inspired the Chinese and all the peoples of East Asia with its affirmation of a humanist ethics. As the Gospels are to Jesus, the Analects is the only place where we can encounter the real, living Confucius. In this gem-like translation by Simon Leys, Confucius speaks with clarity and brilliance. He emerges as a man of great passion and many enthusiasms, a man of bold action whose true vocation is politics. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) lived in an age of acute cultural and political crisis. Many of his observations mark a world sinking into violence and barbarity. Unable to obtain the leading political role he sought, he endeavored to reform society and salvage civilization through ethical debate, defining for ages to come the public mission of the intellectual."

And here are some quotes from The Analects :

"To be able under all circumstances to practice five things constitutes perfect virtue; these five things are gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness and kindness."

"He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn towards it."

"Is it not pleasant to learn with a constant perseverance and application? ...Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters? ...Is he not a man of complete virtue, who feels no discomposure though men may take no note of him?"

"To rule a country of a thousand chariots, there must be reverent attention to business, and sincerity; economy in expenditure, and love for men; and the employment of the people at the proper seasons."

"A youth, when at home, should be filial, and, abroad, respectful to his elders. He should be earnest and truthful. He should overflow in love to all, and cultivate the friendship of the good. When he has time and opportunity, after the performance of these things, he should employ them in polite studies."

Yesterday I was invited to give a talk at the University of Delaware. I have been invited to give academic presentations on several occasions previously but this is the first time that I have been invited to give an academic presentation at a University. Interactions with the faculty members there were so fruitful in helping me to think about my own work.

This morning I went to give a presentation at the annual Model United Nations event that is held at our university. I was asked to speak to UNESCO (the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization) on the topic of secondary schooling. This is not my area of expertise at all but in my second year as a professor I am now used to having to prepare things to say every week in areas that are outside my area of expertise and it is one of the things that makes this job so WONDERFUL--- the learning that one must engage in on a daily basis.

So I gave my few comments to a beautifully diverse collection of about one hundred bright young high school students all representing a particular country to which they had been assigned. The students were all so CUTE that I just wanted to hug them all. That sounds so silly but it accurately expresses the desire I felt. And they had such wonderful questions to ask.

A couple of the things that I found myself telling them in my brief "speech" were ideas that I gleaned from the FUNDAEC philosophy of rural education. These included the point that much of secondary schooling serves to alienate learners in rural areas of the world from their environment. There are six principles that guide the FUNDAEC approach to rural education. I shared with them the following two:

Consider the people as potential resources and not as problems

"The populations with which FUNDAEC works are not perceived according to the visions common in projects of social action—as masses of undernourished people, overwhelmed by problems and needs. For FUNDAEC, the people are irreplaceable resources in a self-sustaining process of change; the challenge is to find methods that allow them to fully express this potential in all its dimensions."

Do NOT look at them as "masses of undernourished people, overwhelmed by problems and needs."

Instead see them as "irreplaceable resources in a self sustaining process of change". I LOVE this. I am just letting the potency and power of this switch of thinking penetrate my conciousness and I LOVE it.

I also shared with them the wisdom contained in principle number 4--that of

Engaging in the search for pertinent knowledge and the integration of both the traditional and the modern:

"The villagers of the world receive a technology that is the result of scientific progress applied to the conditions of larger farmers whose logic of production is entirely different from that of campesino societies in the process of transition and/or disintegration. In its search for such structures, FUNDAEC conceived the University for Integral Development as a social space in which two systems of knowledge, a modern one (in all its sophistication) and a traditional one, pertaining to the people of the region, would interact in a healthy way. "

The spiritual foundations for the work of FUNDAEC are far more key and so thoroughly revolutionary to the dominant materialist paradigms that determine the structure of current global society but I did not try to share these. I am looking forward to exploring understandings of the harm that dominant paradigms of modernization have wreaked on humanity more fully as I work on developing my course in Comparative Education next semester...

"Development defined in terms of certain patterns of “modernization” seems to refer exactly to those processes which promote the domination of man’s material ambitions over his spiritual goals. One of the manifestations of this type of progress, and this unbalanced obsession with industrialization is the accelerated disintegration of rural life witnessed during the past few decades. The analysis of the existing rural problems and the historical evolution of development efforts in the post war era convinced the founders of FUNDAEC that this false version of modernization is not only a goal unattainable by the majority of humanity but also one that is undesirable, and that the misery that reigns in rural areas and the slums of many cities is nothing but a logical consequence of the bankruptcy of dominant social ideologies. FUNDAEC’s development programs are carried out in the context of a search for a scientific and technologically modern society, but one that will base its educational, economic, administrative, political, and cultural structures on the concept of the integral nature of the human being and not only on his or her material needs."