Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

Series Editor's Preface. Introduction by John Breuilly. Acknowledgements. 1. Definitions. State and nation. The nation. 2. Culture in Agrarian Society. Power and culture in the agro-literature society. The varieties of agrarian rulers. 3. Industrial Society. The society of perpetual growth. Social genetics. The age of universal high culture. 4. The Transition to an Age of Nationalism. A note on the weakness of nationalism. Wild and garden culture. 5. What is a Nation. The course of true nationalism never did run smooth. 6. Social Entropy and Equality in Industrial Society. Obstacles to entropy. Fissures and barriers. A diversity of focus. 7. A Typology of Nationalisms. The varieties of nationalist experience. Diaspora nationalism. 8. The Future of Nationalism. Industrial culture - one or many?. 9. Nationalism and Ideology. Who is for Nuremberg?. One nation, one state. 10. Conclusion. What is not being said. Summary. Select bibliography. Bilbliography of Ernest Gellner's writing: Ian Jarvie. Index

Nations and Nationalism

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers

After virtue, a study in moral theory

Inclusion and democracy.

Confucianism, long regarded as the key philosophy on personal character-building and interpersonal relations in Chinese society, used to be pivotal to citizenship education in Taiwan, but that has changed in the last 20 years. In the wake of democratization in the late 1980s, growing liberalism and pluralism in Taiwanese society prompted the authorities to widen the scope of the school curriculum to include a diversity of cultures and thus the influence of this ancient Chinese philosophy began to fade away. The new citizenship curriculum, introduced in 2010, is no longer structured around Confucian moral guidance, but has instead embraced pluralism. Confucianism, from the perspective of those Taiwanese citizenship curriculum designers who were interviewed, hinders the formation of civil society due to its overly strong emphasis on familial kinship and “sovereign-subject” paternalism. Engulfed by Confucian moral principles, the critical and reflective competence of the individual often fails to develop. Th...

Tradition meets pluralism: the receding Confucian values in the Taiwanese citizenship curriculum

This article compares the development of citizenship education (CE) in Taiwan and England, as well as teachers' perceptions about the liberal and communitarian constructs underpinning the curriculum in both countries. Due to distinct social and political environments, the Taiwanese and English CE curricula demonstrate an interesting contrast. Until 1987, the Taiwanese curriculum grew under an authoritarian regime which had implemented the citizenship curriculum in 1945; in England, however, CE was not added to the school timetable until 2002, after a long debate about the controversial and potential influence of the subject. This article first offers an overview of the development of CE in Taiwan and England. Following this preliminary understanding, interview accounts with 20 CE teachers are included to share insights based on actual practical experience. The English curriculum leans towards a communitarian type of ‘active citizenship’, but teachers in England mention a gap between the theory and practic...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2304/csee.2013.12.2.86

A Critical Discussion of the Citizenship Curriculum in Taiwan and England: Teachers' Voices on Liberal and Communitarian Constructs

In early 2014, a group of senior high school teachers initiated a series of campaigns to fight against the government's imposition of a revised history and citizenship education curriculum, an unpr...

Educators as Transformative Intellectuals: Taiwanese Teacher Activism during the National Curriculum Controversy.

The national curriculum reformers, regarded as members of the social elites and intellectuals, projected their vision of identity onto the curriculum which they constructed and influenced the next generation’s national consciousness. In the tangled relationship between politics and education, the selection of the reformers in a sense dictates the direction of the new curriculum. This article interviewed 18 reformers, members of the latest citizenship curriculum of 2010, to investigate their individual views on identities and the monolithically-promoted Chinese configuration in the old curriculum. Although the new citizenship curriculum, renamed Curriculum Guidelines for Civics and Society, puts nothing in writing in favour of either a Chinese or Taiwanese national identity, according to the discovery in this research, the Curriculum Committee implicitly embedded a transformed inclusive and hyphenated Taiwanese national identity in the new curriculum in the hope of accentuating Taiwan’s exclusive s...

The reformulation of national identity in the new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum through the lens of curriculum reformers

This article aims to investigate how the discourse on national identity is approached in the new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum. The differing opinions on Taiwan’s relationship with China and the constant threat from this rising superpower have deterred the explicit promotion of either a Taiwanese or Chinese identity. The new curriculum follows a strategy of ‘intentional ambiguity’, where neither identity is mentioned. In this ‘polysemous’ form, the curriculum has been criticized for staying silent on the question of cultivating a national identity. However, the curriculum developers interviewed for this paper suggested that parents and pupils who examine the new curriculum can find support for whichever national identity they favor since it is designed in such an inclusive manner. They can then simultaneously reflect on the multiple, divergent or competing meanings behind the ‘polysemous texts’ and this ‘hermeneutic’ process of reasoning can then facilitate the choice of national identity with maximum ...

Cheng-Yu Hung

Papers

Tradition meets pluralism: the receding Confucian values in the Taiwanese citizenship curriculum

A Critical Discussion of the Citizenship Curriculum in Taiwan and England: Teachers' Voices on Liberal and Communitarian Constructs

Educators as Transformative Intellectuals: Taiwanese Teacher Activism during the National Curriculum Controversy.

The reformulation of national identity in the new Taiwanese citizenship curriculum through the lens of curriculum reformers

Ambiguity as deliberate strategy: the ‘de-politicized’ discourse of national identity in the Taiwanese citizenship curriculum