On a recent fall morning, students filed into a classroom at Sun Yat-sen University, whose leafy main campus hugs the banks of the south-winding Pearl River. They thumbed last-minute text messages, jockeyed for seats near the open windows, and shrugged off drooping backpacks. Their massive Wheelock’s Latin textbooks, weighing in at more than two and a half pounds, hit their desks with a deep thunk.
Wait—Latin? In China?
Indeed, these students, some of the university’s best, are studying not just Latin but ancient Greek and Chinese. Also, literature, art, and the classic texts of Eastern and Western philosophy, all part of a young liberal-arts program, now in its third year, known as the Boya College.
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Ricky Wong for The Chronicle
Student ambassadors promote new general-education courses to fellow students at the City U. of Hong Kong. Such courses will make Hong Kong’s graduates more appealing to employers, experts say.
Ricky Wong for The Chronicle
Wu Hai, a professor, meets for a tutorial with two students at Boya College, the elite liberal-arts program of Sun Yat-sen U., in Guangzhou, China. Those enrolled in the program study Latin, ancient Greek, and ancient Chinese, as well as classic Eastern and Western philosophy.
Ricky Wong for The Chronicle
Tang Heyu, who goes by Ivy, attends a class on ancient Chinese archaeology at Boya College.
Courtesy of St. Clare’s Girls’ School
In Bruno Li’s classroom at St. Clare’s Girls’ School, in Hong Kong, the curriculum includes a mandatory subject known as liberal studies, meant to increase students’ awareness of their society and the world. A similar requirement will hit colleges this fall.
Ricky Wong for The Chronicle
Students rehearse a play at the fledgling international division of Peking U.'s high school, in Beijing. Parents say they hope the division’s liberal-arts program will help their children learn to think critically.
Sun Yat-sen’s East-meets-West curriculum is distinctive, but its embrace of liberal education—education across disciplines, meant to provoke broad thinking—is far from unusual. At a time when China and its East Asian neighbors are trouncing U.S. students on international exams, educators in these countries are nonetheless adopting, and adapting, that quintessentially American approach to learning.
Some of the top institutions in the region, like Sun Yat-sen and Taiwan’s Tunghai University, are setting up selective liberal-education programs. In South Korea, a declaration by the late Apple chief Steve Jobs that equal parts liberal learning and technological know-how were critical to the computer giant’s success has kindled interest in the humanities. This coming fall, all university students in Hong Kong will be required to take a new, fourth year of general-education courses.
These undergraduate-education reforms, promoted by government officials and business leaders as well as educators, stem from a basic economic calculus: The countries’ current educational systems have produced stellar test takers but few innovators and inventors. Exams, says Edmond I. Ko, an American-educated professor of engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and a former member of the territory’s powerful University Grants Committee, “don’t measure the kind of student we want to educate.”
The global economy is placing new demands on international hubs like Hong Kong and Singapore and opening up China’s once-closed markets to overseas investment. Not only do new hires in these places have to collaborate with counterparts around the globe, they’re also competing for jobs. And they’re not faring well, dinged for inflexible thinking, inability to work in teams, and lack of creativity. A survey of Hong Kong employers rated local graduates far inferior to those educated abroad. In mainland China, more than one in 10 graduates have yet to find a job a year later, even in a booming economy.
Casting their eyes West, reformers have latched onto American-style liberal, or general, education as a way to foster more nimble and adaptable thinkers. “These countries realize that, in order to become a global leader, you need a creative class,” says Gerard A. Postiglione, an education professor at the University of Hong Kong.
But although the efforts share the goal of broadening out the narrow, professionally oriented degree programs favored by local institutions, they may have little in common with the U.S. model, and even less with one another. Some take a canonical Great Books approach, others emphasize interdisciplinarity, while still others are a hodgepodge of courses in public speaking, foreign languages, and computer literacy—in short, anything outside major requirements.
Curriculum is just one of many challenges raised by the push toward liberal education. How do you develop new courses with faculty brought up within the very system they are trying to change? How do you deal with resistance from parents who fear that studying literature or anthropology will distract from job preparation?
More fundamentally, is the very notion of liberal education compatible with China’s Communist government, or Japan’s emphasis on hierarchy, or, more broadly, regional norms that prize group cohesion over the development of the individual? Is it possible, or even appropriate, to graft a Western approach to learning onto a markedly different culture?
Confucius, Meet Plato
The question of how to marry East and West is thrown into particular relief at Sun Yat-sen, where Boya students read Confucius and Plato, Xun Zi and Jacques Derrida. But Gan Yang, Boya’s founding dean and head of the university’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, argues that the notion of the broadly educated leader goes back millennia in Chinese culture. After all, ancient Mandarin civil servants didn’t study public administration but were tutored in music, art, and philosophy.
As recently as the first half of the 20th century, in fact, Chinese educators like Mei Yiqi, a prominent president of Tsinghua University, emphasized the importance of the well-rounded graduate. That changed with the Communist takeover. Top comprehensive institutions like Tsinghua became polytechnics focused on producing engineers and scientists needed to industrialize and modernize the national economy. Then, beginning in the mid-1960s, universities across the country were closed for a decade, casualties of the Cultural Revolution. Mr. Gan recalls his father, a scientist shut out of his laboratory, spending much of his time reading, exposing his son to the richness of the humanities.
Elsewhere, the turn toward specialized education was less sharp but still profound. Onetime British colonies like Singapore and Hong Kong inherited that country’s higher-education system, where university students “read” a single subject, rather than take courses across a range of disciplines.
In China’s reopened universities, college curricula slowly began to expand in the 1990s. In addition to compulsory courses in political ideology, physical education, and English language, several dozen top universities were designated by the government to offer wenhua suzhi jiaoyu, or cultural quality education. The term denotes electives and extracurricular activities meant to give students a more wide-ranging educational experience and to cultivate the whole person, says Cao Li, deputy director of liberal education at Tsinghua.
At Zhejiang University, on China’s east coast, students study history, culture, and economics. Huazhong University of Science and Technology runs a popular lecture series in the humanities, bringing in international scholars and political figures. A 10-year plan, approved by the Chinese cabinet in 2010, calls for introducing more students to critical thinking and learning across disciplines.
Still, undergraduate education remains fairly rigid: Except at a few high-ranked universities, students choose their majors before they even set foot on campus, selecting from a list of more than 600 specialities. In Hong Kong, where government scholarships cover the cost of higher education, the University Grants Committee sets the number of students who can study each subject based on job projections; those whose scores on the high-school exit exam aren’t good enough to earn them a place in popular disciplines may find themselves studying their second choice—or third or fourth.
Once on campus, students’ courses are highly proscribed, and numerous. Brian P. Coppola, a professor of chemistry at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, recently returned from a year teaching at Peking University. He was shocked to learn, he says, that his organic-chemistry students were enrolled in as many as nine classes a semester and would take 45 courses and labs in chemistry alone by graduation. Michigan chemistry majors, by contrast, are required to take 15 courses in the field.
Students’ schedules are so packed, Mr. Coppola says, few have time for nonrequired courses or even to attend office hours. “They barely have time to think,” he says.
Tang Heyu, a cheerful, ponytailed 20-year-old who goes by Ivy, says she has far fewer classes in her studies at Boya College than do other Sun Yat-sen students, just five or six a semester. Instead, she spends eight hours a day or more in study groups or working in the library, where she struggles through original texts, essays, and criticism, much of it not in her native Chinese. Like many of her Boya College classmates, she hopes to go on to earn a graduate degree.
“Our professors don’t mean to tell us knowledge. They mean to encourage us to find it out for ourselves,” Ms. Tang says, on break from yet another marathon study session. She marvels at the number of papers and commentaries on major philosophers like Socrates. “I sometimes feel I will not be able to get to all of the books,” she says.
Reading ‘1984' in Beijing
The situation was much different at Ms. Tang’s high school in Mianyang, in Sichuan Province, where she says she spent most of her time learning how to do well on China’s national college-entrance test, known as the gao kao. “I think learning in high school isn’t really learning,” she says.
Indeed, the tendency toward narrow education begins long before university. High-school students in China and elsewhere are channeled into set academic tracks, in the sciences and the humanities, and much of the curriculum focuses on subjects and skills measured by the all-important college entry exam, which determines whether, and where, a student will earn university admission.
The winnowing, in fact, starts still earlier. In China, students seeking to go to top high schools must pass the zhong kao, an admissions test.
Yanhong Wheeler is an elfin, spiky-haired author and activist dubbed the “anti-Tiger Mom” in the Chinese press for her opposition to the strict parenting style espoused by Amy Chua, the Chinese-American law professor who boasted of forbidding play dates and sleepovers so her daughters could focus on schoolwork. Settling in for a cup of tea at an outdoor cafe in her chic Beijing neighborhood, Ms. Wheeler, the author of several Chinese best sellers on child-rearing, criticizes the pressure put on Chinese children and excoriates the textbooks in local schools as “dry, dead, boring, dreary, like something from the Soviet Union.”
Her son, 12, attends an international school; her 9-year-old daughter goes to an alternative school that emphasizes the arts. “I wouldn’t give any consideration to sending them to a mainstream school,” she says, noting that she and her husband have educational options not available to most Chinese parents, including moving back to his native New Zealand. Still, she believes that more and more parents will come to demand a broader, less rote education for their children.
Some of those parents have gathered around a crowded lunchroom table another morning at Peking University High School. Their children are enrolled in the school’s fledgling international division, which is set up as a liberal-arts high school with small classes, group discussion, and course offerings like drama and journalism.
Guo Li-ping is a professor at Peking University, where she sees her undergraduates struggle to think critically. She wanted something different than the “burden of getting high marks” for her son, Yang Daocun, or Darren, a 16-year-old with a Justin Bieber mop-top. Since enrolling at the high school a year and a half ago, Darren has become “happier and motivated to learn” and, Ms. Guo says approvingly, has formed his own band.
Another mother, Jane Hu, says she worries about the “gray or the black side of competition” in Chinese schools. “It’s not so good.” She pulls a book from her handbag, On Gold Mountain, the story of an immigrant Chinese family that she is reading along with her daughter’s class.
Upstairs, Jiang Xueqin’s literature class is dissecting 1984 in halting English (humanities courses at the high school are held in English). Mr. Jiang, the high school’s deputy principal and director of the international division, is running the discussion as if it were being held at his alma mater, Yale University. “Can you build a society based on fear, cruelty, lack of humanity?” he asks, as the 16 students stare down at the text, seemingly searching for an answer. “Do you know of a society founded on cruelty or hatred?”
One student finally volunteers, “Nazi Germany?”
“Let me ask: Is Chinese society like this today?” Mr. Jiang responds, before asking students to go online and search for examples in the news of actions driven by love or hate.
Walking around the school grounds a few hours later, Mr. Jiang says it’s important to make learning relevant: “That’s why when we read a book like 1984, we try to draw a connection to their lives, their society.” That would be unthinkable, he admits, in most Chinese classrooms, but he thinks there are enough parents fed up with the current system to pay a tuition of about $12,700. Just 43 students are enrolled in his program now, but the high school is building a gleaming new building that can accommodate nearly 10 times as many.
All of Mr. Jiang’s students, however, plan to go abroad for college. While he says he sees some reforms at regular Chinese high schools—including more arts and physical education, a greater emphasis on group work, and an explosion of student clubs—he dismisses the idea that a liberal education could work for students who stay within the Chinese education system. “I believe that a liberal-arts approach to education and standardized testing are in contrast with each other, and so I don’t think it would be feasible,” he says. A mainstream school, he adds, “is nothing more than a test-prep center.”
Reforming From Within
Incorporating liberal education into the existing system is exactly what Hong Kong is attempting. In the fall of 2009, every high school began teaching a mandatory subject known as liberal studies, part of a top-to-bottom effort to expose students to the humanities and general education. This fall, the final phase of reform will hit Hong Kong’s universities.
Students in Bruno Li’s class at St. Clare’s Girls’ School leap to attention when visitors enter, standing smartly beside their desks in tidy white dresses and red-buttoned pinafores. “Go-od morn-ing,” they chant in unison.
Liberal studies, which comprises about 10 percent of total lesson time, has multiple goals, whispers James Yiu, a chief curriculum-development officer for the Hong Kong Education Bureau, who is sitting in on the class. It is meant to increase students’ awareness of their society and the world, to broaden their knowledge base and expose them to differing perspectives, and to enhance their critical-thinking skills. Last year, the government handed out grants of more than $41,000, to help schools build their liberal-studies programs.
As part of the day’s lesson, Mr. Li is showing the students snippets of a news documentary on the demolition of the historic Star Ferry terminal on Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour. The pier was pulled down five years earlier, before many of these 14- and 15-year-olds can remember, and between segments of the film, which features interviews with conservation activists, urban planners, and environmentalists, he asks the girls to go to the chalkboard and mark whether or not they support the destruction. They do, giggling.
At first, nearly all the students indicate they favor the tear-down, no surprise in a city in which new construction alters the skyline almost daily. But as they hear arguments about the environmental impact and the pier’s historic significance, many change their vote. This pleases Mr. Yiu. “In almost every lesson,” he says, “we’re trying to get them to see issues from multiple perspectives.”
Mr. Li leads the class smoothly through a discussion of conflict and compromise, but later, over tea and cake, he admits that adjusting to the new coursework hasn’t been easy. There are no textbooks, and teachers, pulled from different disciplines, have struggled to master the subject matter. Mr. Li, whose background is in biology, regularly exchanges tips and lesson plans with other St. Clare’s faculty and is also working with Mr. Yiu’s agency on training materials and workshops for teachers throughout Hong Kong. “We have had to learn new skills,” he says.
If teachers are uneasy, students and parents appear even more so. More than half the students surveyed by a Hong Kong education-policy group said they were not confident of doing well in liberal studies. Parents have thronged question-and-answer sessions hosted by the Education Bureau and by individual schools; one cornered Mr. Yiu the previous weekend at a wedding banquet. The source of much of the anxiety? How new questions about liberal studies will affect students’ scores on the high-school exit exam.
Hiring for More Than Skill
Uncertainty about Hong Kong’s liberal-education reform, and about the coming changes in the undergraduate curriculum, have helped drive up applications to British universities by more than 35 percent. It’s understandable in a culture where a university degree is viewed as the final step in a path toward a career and where children are expected to provide for their parents in old age.
Wang Yu, or David, a third-year Boya College student, says his parents “were not exactly excited” when he decided to switch his major from business English to liberal arts, questioning what kind of profession such a degree would lead to. “They’re always worried about practical problems,” he says.
There’s some irony at play: Students and parents suspicious about liberal education cite fears about job prospects, yet it’s business leaders who are among the loudest voices for reform.
Jim Leininger is with the Beijing office of the human-resources-consulting firm Towers Watson. He recalls one American oil executive frustrated by the lack of participation by Chinese employees in brainstorming sessions. These workers are uncomfortable shouting out possible solutions, Mr. Leininger told the man, because they were educated in a system where “there always is a context where something is right and something is wrong.”
It’s not just multinational companies that express concern about graduates’ readiness for a global work environment. Executives at Japanese companies complain about graduates’ poor critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. “People know their own field, but once they’re outside it, they don’t know where to start,” says Keiko Momii, who conducted an employer survey for the country’s National Institute for Educational Policy Research. That was fine, she says, when companies hired for life, but today’s employees need to be able to shift jobs and careers.
Po Chung is a co-founder and former chairman of the global shipping company DHL International. From his office above the polished office towers of Hong Kong’s Wan Chai district, Mr. Chung, who hums with barely contained energy, criticizes the current education system as out of step with the market demands. Why are Hong Kong universities turning out graduates for a manufacturing economy, he asks, when more than 90 percent of the jobs are in the service sector? Whipping out a dry-erase board—"I have to use one of these now that I’ve moved into the educational domain,” he jokes—he enumerates the qualities a well-rounded worker needs to have, such as the capacity to be a lifelong learner.
“Business people would say there’s something missing” in current graduates, Mr. Chung says. “We can train skill, but we need to hire something more.” If Hong Kong can revamp its educational system, he predicts, it can serve as a critical bridge between a booming China and the rest of the world.
Tapping Into Talent
To help make that happen, Mr. Chung, who attended Whittier College and Humboldt State University, both in California, has brought more than two dozen American academics with liberal-arts expertise to act as in-house advisers to Hong Kong universities, through his support of a special Fulbright Grant program.
Many of the efforts at reform tap imported talent. In addition to the Fulbrighters, American and expat professors populate academic leadership positions: The provost at City University of Hong Kong and the vice president for academic development at Hong Kong Polytechnic University are both hires from the University of California system. Haydn H.D. Chen, who spent more than two decades at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has emphasized liberal education at Tunghai University, in Taiwan, since becoming president in 2004. The National University of Singapore has turned to Yale faculty to help start the nation-state’s first residential liberal-arts college.
David Jaffee didn’t know much about Hong Kong when he came to spend a Fulbright year at City University, but as a former assistant vice president for undergraduate studies at the University of North Florida, he does know a lot about the liberal arts.
Like others in the program, Mr. Jaffee, a professor of sociology, organized faculty-development sessions at Hong Kong’s eight universities and helped City University vet its general-education course proposals. In many ways, he walked away from the experience impressed. “We tinker with general education all the time here, but they were doing it from the ground up,” he says, by phone from Florida.
At the same time, he became concerned that a lack of familiarity with the tenets of liberal education was leading some institutions and faculty members to construe it very broadly. Mr. Jaffee recalls a proposal for a course in computer security. As a straightforward primer on the subject, he thought it should not qualify as general education because it didn’t delve into wider social and philosophical issues like the effect of online piracy on concepts of privacy. But others on the curriculum panel did not have such objections: “They’d say, ‘It’s general knowledge that people should have. It’s in a discipline not students’ own.’”
At Hong Kong Poly, meanwhile, general education will have a decidedly practical flavor, with requirements in public speaking, writing, and leadership and interpersonal skills. As a largely engineering and science-oriented university, Poly has historically had few faculty members in the humanities, points out Walter W. Yuen, the vice president for academic development.
Other offerings are more interdisciplinary. A philosopher, a biologist, and a mechanical engineer at City University, for example, have teamed up to offer a course on the science of kung fu. At the University of Hong Kong, students can choose among courses such as “Blood, Beliefs, and Biology,” “Cultural Heritages in the Contemporary World,” and “Love, Marriage, and Sex in Modern China.”
Tsz Hin Law is loitering in a City University hallway, waiting to talk with his professor, Rocío G. Davis, about a general-education course he is taking, “Reading and Writing America,” one of several dozen in a pilot this year. “Before, I thought America is all white people,” Mr. Law, who introduces himself with the English name Hennessy, says. But he’s learned about other groups, black, Hispanic—and Amish. “I did a project on them, a strange culture,” he says. He has enjoyed the course, with its nontraditional subject matter and open discussion. “It’s quite free, and I like that.”
Ms. Davis, who is head of the English department, says she and her fellow professors have enjoyed developing courses, like the one on American culture, that dovetail with their own research interests. General education “allows us to teach our own stuff,” she says.
Indeed, sometimes the faculty response has been overwhelming. At Hong Kong Baptist University, for instance, the new director of general education, A. Reza Höshmand, inherited an unmanageable 235 approved general-education courses.
That hasn’t always been the case. Efforts to create liberal-education programs or colleges at China’s top institutions have not been universally supported by faculty, who worry that the liberal-education program could siphon resources or lead to changes, both in instruction and structure, in their own departments. “In principle, everyone says it’s a beautiful thing, but when you put it into practice you meet many, many barriers,” says Cao Li of Tsinghua. “It is something added to the curriculum, like an appendage.”
Others are not convinced that undergraduate-education reform is the way to go. Xudong Gao, vice director for the Research Center for Technological Innovation at Tsinghua, argues for new curricular models at the graduate level. Earlier stages of study, he says, are more suited for teaching fundamentals and for knowledge transfer.
Teaching American
Nerves wake Wu Hai at 3 a.m. every Friday, five hours before his weekly class on ancient Chinese thought begins. Mr. Wu, a young professor at Boya College, stands awkwardly in front a computer screen, projecting fragments of text onto the wall behind him. Once he gets started, however, he speaks fluidly, even energetically, about shifts in the philosophical traditions between the Han, Tang, and Song dynasties. But only occasionally does he pause during the 100-minute lecture to allow a student to murmur a question or comment. While most in the class of 20 sit alertly, in a corner, one puts her head down and naps.
Lecturing without discussion is an anathema to many American scholars of the liberal arts. “What are they going to do, have the professor tell the students how to think critically?” says Kathryn Mohrman, only half joking. But given the long history of teacher-centered learning in Asia, it may not be realistic to expect academics there to fully embrace the seminar-style give and take that is a hallmark of U.S. classrooms, says Ms. Mohrman, director of the University Design Consortium at Arizona State University and an author of a forthcoming essay on general education in China. “Maybe the pedagogical style doesn’t move as far.”
It’s not just professors who have bought into this more passive approach. “Students think if a teacher is not lecturing, they’re not doing their job,” says Jing Lin, a University of Maryland professor who is working on a project to introduce more participatory styles of learning at Chinese universities.
It can be slow going. During a new general-education course at Hong Kong Poly, a lecturer asks for volunteers to enact a scene in which they demonstrate empathy, part of a lesson on social competence. There are no takers. “I’ve talked quite a bit,” the lecturer, Allen Dorcas, prods, “and even if you’re not tired of listening, I’m tired of talking.” Finally, a pair of students are persuaded to perform a brief skit in which one consoles the other after his mother’s death.
Lynn Ilon, a professor of education at Seoul National University, says many of her students are sharp, sophisticated thinkers; it’s just that they have not been encouraged to speak out. “When they’re given permission, they’re incredibly creative,” she says.
Ivy Tang, the Boya student, says her favorite class in her three years of study is one taught by a professor from Columbia University, one of several outsiders who have supplemented the college’s small staff. “He had much experience in teaching,” says Ms. Tang, who hopes to attend graduate school in the United States. “He taught us as if we were in America.”
Borrowing the Brand
This raises the question: Can a Western-style educational approach work in a more-closed system like China’s? Can one educate liberally in a society that’s anything but?
Carol Geary Schneider, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, expresses a fair amount of skepticism that liberal education will sweep Asia. It’s a way of thinking, not just a “patch” to be superimposed on an existing system, she says. “It’s not just adding the humanities and stirring.”
For those who find Asia’s infatuation with liberal arts misguided, this hodgepodge approach is indicative of the field’s inherent weaknesses. Sin-Ming Shaw, a Hong Kong investor and economist, who has been a visiting scholar at a number of Western universities, including Harvard and Oxford, decries the reform efforts as “me-too liberal education, American style. Pretty mindless.”
“I have serious doubts about the value of a liberal education, especially when no one really knows how to define what it is,” he says.
But Delia Lin, a Chinese-born lecturer in Asian studies at the University of Adelaide, in Australia, says confusion about the reforms stems from a fundamental misconception. Asians might talk about “liberal education,” but “they’re just borrowing the brand.” To Westerners, it means creativity, critical inquiry, and self-examination. But in the East, Confucian tradition seeks to cultivate a good, knowledgeable, thoughtful individual, one who serves society and community.
Take Peking University, which modeled its Yuanpei College on Harvard’s common core, says Wanying Wang, a visiting scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the college. The purpose of general education at Harvard, she says, is to “cultivate the whole person,” while a Yuanpei education is “mainly about how to meet the demands of the society.”
“It’s shaped by its context, by the needs of China,” Ms. Wang says.
Harkening back to ancient Mandarin roots, many of the experiments are unapologetically aimed at elites: The 400 students in Tunghai’s Po-Ya School of Liberal Arts live in a separate dormitory, have faculty mentors, and are enrolled in special courses and cultural programs like calligraphy, music, and fine arts. At Tsinghua, small groups of engineering and management students, just a couple of dozen apiece, participate in gifted-education programs that combine the humanities with their major curriculum. The Boya College selects 30 top students a year, plucking them from the pool of roughly 8,000 incoming freshmen through an extensive interview process. Not only do the liberal-arts students have to master English, Greek, and Latin, but the archaic Chinese texts even tripped up a native-speaking translator.
To be sure, there are efforts to make sure all students get a taste of general education—beginning next year, all Sun Yat-sen undergraduates will have to take a selection of interdisciplinary electives—but such projects require funds and faculty expertise, something in short supply in provincial or poorer universities.
The result could be a two-track system, says Kathryn Mohrman of Arizona State. At some institutions, the reforms may be “more form than substance,” says Ms. Mohrman, who was director of the Johns Hopkins University’s Nanjing center. “A few liberal-arts classes in college are not going to make you blossom into a critical thinker.”
What will it take for reforms to truly take hold? Japan, after all, has been flirting with liberal education since just after World War II, when it was introduced by American universities; such efforts have amounted to little. Universities in the region have gained international prominence for research, not teaching. In South Korea, educators and business leaders talk about the need for more innovative graduates, “but at this stage,” says Lee Seongho, a professor of education at Chung-Ang University, “it’s a gesture at best.”
The Western liberal-arts tradition can’t, and shouldn’t be easily adopted by Asian universities, many say. “We have to look to the student who comes to us,” says Xu Ningsheng, Sun Yat-sen’s president. “If we only copy from the U.S., I don’t think it will fit.” In the end, the efforts to reform undergraduate education, while importing what educators in the region see as the best of the West, are likely to look unmistakably Eastern.
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