This is My Life after all’
The Social Reconstruction of the Personhood in a Taiwanese Experimental School
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12930609 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Wai Lok Ng (Brunel University of London, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 71-98 |
| Publication date | 2020-11-11 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Anthropology Matters (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1758-6453 • E-ISSN: 1758-6453 |
| Publisher | NomadIT (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.22582/am.v20i1.543 |
| OpenAlex | W3104923529 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 21 |
This article examines a Taiwanese ‘free’ school, which I name as Wholesome School, based on an ethnography of forty-six days participating and observing teachers’ and students’ lives on campus. Taiwan, a democratic country under the influence of the progressive education movement, provided fertile soil for education innovation. A group of educators detested the state’s factory schooling model, which upholds a single ideal of academic success and the Confucius value of filial piety and obedience, and founded Wholesome. These teachers reinvented the social game rules of schooling and endowed students with liberty, equality, and independence. In the boarding school, students lived idiosyncratically and negotiated with the others on their freedom and responsibility. Responsible for their own choices, Wholesome students learned to discover their selves, make autonomous decisions, and respect individuality as well as diversity. From this research, it is evident that while social structures have a significant power in structuring habitus and limiting choices, social actors are aware of the rules of the structures they are embedded in and the serious stakes involved in playing the games and are capable of creatively accepting, rejecting, and modifying such rules by means of their agency and reflexivity
Agency (philosophy · Cultural capital · Democracy · Habitus · Ideal (ethics · Independence (probability theory · Obedience · Pedagogy · Personhood · Political science · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Value (mathematics · Gender Studies · Global Education and Multiculturalism · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology
The managerial imperative and the practice of leadership in schools
Making Gender
Distinction
Learning to Labor
Sensation seeking and internet dependence of Taiwanese high school adolescents
Children, Rights and Childhood
Filial Piety and Intergenerational Co-residence
Uncommon Schooling
Exploring elderly people's perspectives on successful ageing in Taiwan
They Employ Cleaners to Do that’
We Are All Equal
Inventing Ourselves
The Origins of Progressive Education
Can Liberal Education Make a Comeback? The Case of “Relational Touch” at Summerhill School
We Like to Have Fun
The second modern condition? Compressed modernity as internalized reflexive cosmopolitization
Pedagogy of the oppressed
High School As an Arena for Cultural Conflict and Acculturation for Latino Angelinos
Learning to Work
Among a Hundred Good Virtues, Filial Piety is the First
Raising Global Families
| Highly cited | No |
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