The Chinese Dream, Belt and Road Initiative and the future of education: A philosophical postscript
Michael A. Peters Beijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China
The author said that he had tried to indicate both the significance of education for the future and the principles that lie behind the philosophy of the BRI as the new Silk Road, focusing on the following:
1.Chinese infrastructuralism – the new Chinese development model – ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ infrastructure (i) roads, rail & ports, transport hubs (ii) knowledge networks, ‘technology transfer’ & services (iii) people-to -people (education & ideas exchanges);
2.Philosophy of Openness – economy (trade), society (education, science, tourism), philosophy (interculturalism, world diplomacy), OA, open science, open education;
3.Interconnectivity – digitization, speed & compression, the new 5G digital Silk Road;
4.Eurasia as a geopolitical concept led by Sino-Russian rapproachementFootnote2;
5.China as an emerging techno-state based on AI, 5G, ML, quantum computing etc;
6.The civilizational state and civilizational dialogue and learning, and the future of humanity;
7.A communicational and media model of education: Content, Code, Infrastructure with discrimination among data, information, knowledge and wisdom;
8.‘Educating the Future’ – analysis of the philosophical narratives (Marxist, Confucian, Liberal) that comprise the Chinese Dream, and future Dreams (the Green Dream, the World Diplomacy Dream, the Space Dream, Science Dream, and the Dream of the Bio-Informational Becoming.
It was an attempt to build a philosophical approach to the Chinese Dream through the analysis of narrative (narratology) and the BRI highlighting the future significance of education as an emerging cultural and economic evolutionary development. This is, of course, both speculative and imaginative, and draws strongly on an approach from political economy that in the coming years I hope to develop as a philosophy of education.
Postscript: education the future
In this final chapter, he pulled together the various themes articulated in this book, to briefly comment on the notion of ‘educating the future’ for China. I use the phrase ‘educating the future’ in a number of separate but interrelated ways:
1.Most obviously ‘educating the future’ is a straightforward argument about educating future generations of Chinese students. Indeed, the future depends upon releasing the talents and collective intelligence of the Chinese mind, which is a civilizational concept. This is not an argument about human capital but rather a semiotic view of creative intellectual labour under conditions of increasing connectivity.
2.There is also a second less obvious application that is more content-driven about the curriculum (in a broad sense) of the future, that is, a schema for promotion of constructive narratives that make sense of the past by reading the future. This is a national narratological resource essential for the Chinese Dream. It is imaginary and populist and acts to share a national vision.
3.The third sense is used in the plain sense to suggest that the Chinese Dream, indeed any national dream, requires ‘education’ of the entire population at the level of content and coda. This national education requires an openness and freedom to imagine, to experiment and also to work at national consensus through CCP guidance that aids the process of thinking about China’s future. In the West this has often taken the form of a sci-fi dystopian reminder about what digital or robotic futures might become, as well as the utopian stories we tell ourselves about the future.
4.‘Educating the future’ is also about teaching the populace to dream, to engage in dreaming and to understand dreaming as consisting in the repository of national symbols and culture that are part of an inherited cultural framework that includes ‘core values’ not in an essentialist sense but in an historical, pragmatic and materialist sense: these are the ruling images; this is the reservoir of poetry, philosophy and literature that are the resources for civilizational dreaming.
5.There is also a sense that not only encourages the local population to dream in this way but to translate this into substantial terms for others to understand – the Chinese Dream for foreigners. This surely is an educative process that already takes place through Confucius and language institutes but also through art and literature.
In an era of disruptive innovations and new digital technologies, of widening inequalities and ecological collapse, traditional pedagogical models and educational systems are not designed to prepare our youth to contribute to civilizational dialogue. Revolutionary transformation at the civilizational level includes eradicating poverty, promoting global enlightenment and even becoming a multi-planetary species. The promotion of a species-wide mission – what I call ‘education for the future of humanity’ includes ‘Teaching for Dialogue Among Civilizations’
Jeric Pediglorio