Guoping Zhao

Author and Editor of "Re-envisioning Chinese Education: The Meaning of Person-Making in a New Age"

November 4, 2015

Dr. Guoping Zhao is an educational philosopher. Her primary areas of scholarship are philosophy of education, comparative philosophy, cross-cultural studies of education, and Chinese Education. She is a professor of Social Foundations at School of Educational Studies. Dr. Zhao earned her Ph.D. from University of Virginia in 2002 and has joined OSU since.

With its focus on education as person-making, this book provides a unique vision of the transformative possibilities of education through a meeting of the neo-Confucian tradition of self-cultivation and the Western post-humanist tradition of self-formation. It begins by identifying the current crisis in Chinese education, where an obsessive concern with the pursuit of qualifications and competition in the market economy is sweeping young people into forms of learning that may result in examination success, but do little to nurture the development of personality and moral-spiritual selfhood. Through penetrating historical and philosophical analyses that examine cultural roots of education in the classics, the experience of individuals who were bridge figures in the transition to modernity and the struggles of a deeply conflicted century of educational reform under changing political regimes, the authors uncover some of the reasons for the current crisis. Their consideration of the changing purposes of education over a century of efforts at modernization sheds further light on this crisis and sets the stage for the main question of the book: 'what might a rediscovery of person-making contribute to Chinese education, and indeed to education around the world, in the current era of globalization?'

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2016-honorees/guoping-zhao

Last Updated: 12 January 2022