Educational theory, in its proper sense, is faced with what may be called the fundamental dilemma of human nature. The dilemma is that the realization of human nature must go hand in hand with the impairment of human nature, and that education, in ord...
Educational theory, in its proper sense, is faced with what may be called the fundamental dilemma of human nature. The dilemma is that the realization of human nature must go hand in hand with the impairment of human nature, and that education, in order to realize the human nature, must do the job only in the same temporal process in which the human nature is impaired
Educational theory of Chu Hsi offers an alternative way of solving the dilemma to that of Dewey. In Dewey's theory, the human nature is to be realized, if it ever is, in exactly same manner as it is impaired, i.e., through practical problem-solving, whereas in Chu Hsi's theory, the human nature is separately cultivated in isolation from the practical problem-solving in such a way that the daily practical activities are put under the morally viable influence of the human nature so cultivated.
It is more than expected that in Chu Hsi, unlike in Dewey, the cultivation of human nature, or of the 'primordial mind', plays a fundamentally important role in educational theory. The human nature, as much as its ontological counterpart, the reality, can be cultivated and made intelligible in no other way than by putting it in practice. The term 'metapraxis', in the sense of 'practice of practice', may be used to refer to a family of discourses in which the practice is justified and made intelligible only by the practice itself. As long as the educational theory tries to explain the cultivation of the primordial mind, it may well claim its nature as metapraxis. And by so doing, the educational theory comes to share the same family of discourses with the religious and the political theories.