The Translated Lives of Bildung

• In Event: Traveling Theory

Abstract

When the idea of the modern research university travels across cultural contexts, does it carry its secular premise abroad? This paper address this question by turning to the writings by Cai Yuanpei, an Leipzig-trained Chinese educator widely known for introducing Schiller’s idea of “aesthetic education” to the Republic of China in the early twentieth century. Serving as Minister of Education during the Republican period before assuming chancellorship at Peking University, Cai produced an extensive body of political writings, bringing his educational vision to life through decades of institutional experiments. Here I focus in particular on Cai’s famed thesis on aesthetic education as a substitute for religion in order to explore the promise and peril of treating the university as a political institution where education rivals religion as a transformative political force. To understand the translated lives of aesthetic education is to probe the scope and vitality of a democratic ideal that first found expression through Schiller and his generation of Enlightenment thinkers.

Author

• Ariel Yingqi Tang, Stanford University