on the character. The goal of education should be to get the individual to develop
personal judgment, autonomy, self-decision-making and self-activation, and have
the courage to use the judgment such that they are able to come out of self-inflicted
and unenlightened helplessness and powerlessness. This thinking reminds us of the
Confucian thought of the relationship shared by learning, reflecting and action.
The importance of stimulating teachers and students in such a way has been a
trait developed through different periods in Chinese educational reforms and the
results have been characterised by Xioawei Yang as representing an undoubted leap
in quality
The past thirty years witnessed a very clear picture of the teaching reform: the focus
switched from knowledge and skills to the non-intelligence factors such as interest and
affection (...) The fundamental value of teaching is to enhance every student’s independent,
initiative and healthy development, and every specific subject and comprehensive cur-
riculum should demonstrate its unique irreplaceable values. In other words, every subject
would produce a unique influence on individuals’spiritual growth, because it presents facts
and knowledge, contains the methods and strategies of thinking, and brings students some
unique experience during their learning. (Yang 2010 ,p.5)Xiaowei Yang promotes an even stronger emphasis on these internal aims of
education as a key factor for lifelong learning that will be needed in the future. He
says
The public and parents value Enrolment Rate (升学率) so much that we accordingly tend to
neglect the internal aim of education–to promote the foundational qualities of every
individual and help them to acquire the ability to teach themselves. Therefore, we have to
rethink the value orientation of the school reform, and re-examine the gains and losses of
the teaching reform against it. In the future reform, we must pay more attention to the
fostering of the non-intelligence factors and general abilities such as interest, aspiration,
habits and character, which are beneficial to lifelong learning, so as to realise the potential
role of the basic education as the foundation of students’lifelong learning and development
(Yang 2009). This new orientation may become a new focus and direction of the teaching
reform in mainland China. (Yang 2010 , pp. 6–7)The Chinese experience and results, as described by Yang ( 2010 ) should inspire
Europe to revitalise its bildung tradition. The combination of spirit and knowledge,
in the bildung tradition in Europe, was believed to be achieved through stimulating
the individual in his local surroundings to meet and use art, tradition, history, music
and literature in the development of a wise and comprehensive judgment. The local,
by this thought, is a vital ingredient in a rhetorical teacher agency—to foster and
inspire pupils to local self-empowerment, personal judgment and action in a global
age. The local can be a window to the global. As stated by the English philosopher
Francis Bacon (1605): A wider horizon is often seen by looking at the landscape
through a small window than by standing in the wide landscape trying to see what
is behind all the small windows. Sharing local knowledge openly and globally
brings voice, variety and difference to globalisation.
The second principle of the bildung philosophy was enlightenment of the
individual in relation to society as demos and ethnos—to the people, culture, his-
tory and the political institutions that one is a part of. This implies an agency of
24 The Paradox of Teacher Agency in a Glocalised World 369