Europe Refracted

Abstract

Europe Refracted Western Education and Knowledge in ChinaEuropean educational knowledge and practices have been deeply impacted by the colonial experience. While hegemonic knowledge was exported to the colonies, practices of teaching and governing colonial subjects were tested in the periphery and then reimported to the center. This contribution looks at a case of European education outside Europe that did not take place, at least not entirely, in a colonial setting: China. It argues that the (at least potentially) non-colonial encounter with societies that presented possible alternatives to European civilization was as important in refracting and reframing European knowledge, education, and identity as was the colonial encounter. European education outside Europe was enacted not only in settings of hegemony and resistance but also in more subtly nuanced spaces of encounter.The article explores these dimensions of educational encounter by selectively recapitulating the Jesuits' China mission mainly in the seventeenth century, the inversion of enlightenment enthusiasm about China in Johann Gottfried Herder's account of China in the eighteenth century, the semi-colonial experience in China and its effects for education in the nineteenth century, and some China--Europe educational alliances vis-à-vis America in the early twentieth century. Rather than presenting in-depth historical analyses of the given time periods and processes under way-there exists a large body of literature for each period-such historical snapshots serve to illuminate how European education has been mutually coconstructed both by Europeans and their non-European counterparts.