Tao Xingzhi and Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, part 2: sæcularism in education

In the first part of this series, I noted several points of convergence in the biographies and the pædagogical-political views of the ‘national’ teachers of Iraq and China. Now I feel is a good opportunity to note a singular and important point of divergence. Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî ساطع الحصري has an approach to education which is straightforwardly, aggressively sæcular and even laïcist, very similar in fact to the French approach to public education. (And here we must remember that French was one of al-Ḥuṣrî’s primary languages of childhood instruction, coming even before Arabic!) On the other hand, Tao Xingzhi’s 陶行知 understanding and approach to religion in education is far more complex and deserves careful unpacking, because it engages both his Ru 儒 philosophical leanings and his social-gospel Anglican religious sympathies. There is a certain sense in which Tao Xingzhi is sæcular, and another in which he is almost Milbankian in his religious approach to pædagogy.

Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî is deeply devoted in his writings to the German idealists: Fichte in particular, and Hegel and Herder less prominently (but no less importantly). However, very typically of the Ottoman intellectuals of his generation (including Atatürk, for whom al-Ḥuṣrî maintained a deep respect in his Arabist phase), in his thinking he is far less German than he is French. As William Cleveland notes: ‘Al-Ḥuṣrî was exposed to the scientific method and positivist doctrines from his earliest school days in Istanbul. His first career was that of a natural science teacher during which he was influenced by French literature on the subject rather than by the debates of Muhammad ‘Abduh or the Ottomans of pan-Islâmic persuasion.’ This early inculcation in French positivism deeply colours his view of the rôle of religion in education. For him, the most important moral task of education is to provide students with a basis of solidarity (or more accurately, ‘asabiyya عصبيّة: a concept for which he turned, not to Hegel or to Fichte, but instead to ibn Khaldûn بن خلدون).

As minister for education under his close friend King of Iraq Faysal I, the son of the Sharif al-Husayn ibn ‘Alî who led the 1916 revolt against the Ottomans, Al-Ḥuṣrî unfortunately made himself a number of enemies among the majority-Shi‘ite population of Iraq by insisting on a sæcular, pan-Arabist curriculum to be adopted in Iraqi schools. Al-Ḥuṣrî’s reasoning was clear and his intentions were good: he wanted to inculcate a feeling of nationalist loyalty among Iraqis that would place loyalty to their Sunnî, Christian and even Jewish neighbours over sectarian religious divisions. As a result, he would be attacked as an ‘enemy of God’ by Shi‘i clerics, and popular (though somewhat inaccurate) depictions of al-Ḥuṣrî as an atheist abounded. But even in these aspects of his career we can begin to see the contours of his philosophical commitments as a theorist of education.

Having been raised in the Ottoman Empire and also having thoroughly believed in an imperial Ottomanist idea, Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî took a very dim view of what he considered ‘religious sectarianism’ from the start. True, the Ottoman Empire did function on an imperial ideology that held the Sultân to be also a caliph and the natural leader of the Islâmic ummah. But the Ottoman Empire also prided itself on being a multi-national and multi-confessional imperial polity. Al-Ḥuṣrî had been an Ottomanist in his bones long before he became an Arabist. Though neither of them was by any stretch of the imagination a fundamentalist, the earlier theorists of Arabism like Jamâl ad-Dîn and ‘Abd ar-Rahmân al-Kawâkibî did confess a faith in Islâm as a force for political unity that simply is not present for al-Ḥuṣrî. The last simply could not conceive there being in Islâm any sort of true political unifying force, though the awareness of Islâm as a Rawlsian ‘comprehensive doctrine’ was frightening to him: a yawning Ungrund within which Arabness would be doomed to oblivion. As such, for him, any hint of positive religious claim in an educational curriculum was a kind of intolerable subversion of what he believed the proper loyalty of the Arab should be: to al-urubah, to ‘Arabness’. This is the basis of the ‘asabiyya he seeks after.

Looking specifically to the nationalist awakening in the Balkans – and to Bulgaria, with which he is intimately familiar – al-Ḥuṣrî considers that religion is a much weaker force for unity than the solidarity-ties of kinship and friendship that bind together the thede. Al-Ḥuṣrî’s social thought leans close to Orthodoxy in this aspect: that he separates considerations of the people from those of the state. Good Ottoman that he is, he looks the model of the ‘nation-state’ that developed in the West as a kind of historical accident, and – very unusually for a nationalist of his sort – does not believe nations in the popular sense are naturally inclined to statehood. He looks in particular at how Bulgarian thede-consciousness was as much shaped by its opposition to Greek ecclesial domination as by its opposition to Ottoman oppression.

Ironically, this leads al-Ḥuṣrî to an ever-greater appreciation of Arab Christians, and in particular Eastern Orthodox Arabs, as an example of this kind of ‘asabiyya. When the ancient Antiochian Church took the bold step of insisting on the local election of its own Patriarchs, with the consequence that a Syrian Arab was named to the position, al-Ḥuṣrî cheered the event in retrospect as the ‘first true victory of Arab nationalism’. In the Antiochian Church’s quiet rebellion against both sæcular Istanbul and religious Constantinople, he saw the first hints of a community long subject to a dual oppression (the first to a political Turkification, and the second to a religious Scylla-Charybdis choice between apostasy and assimilation to Hellenism) standing up against both. Even though al-Ḥuṣrî could in no sense be mistaken for an activist of the left, and William Cleveland notes firmly that his pædagogical instincts are firmly ‘top-down’, here his idea of solidarity became a strong insistence on taking the side of the oppressed masses.

Tao Xingzhi has similar instincts, but a very different attitude toward the relationship between religion and education. Tao was educated as a Christian, and continued to consider himself a Christian through much of his career. As a theorist of education, however, Tao stands fairly firmly in the tradition of Song-Ming rationalism 宋明理學 or what philosopher Jiang Qing 蔣慶 calls ‘heart-mind Ru learning’ 心性儒學. As such, he considers Ru to be a tradition of philosophy and not religion (very much like his comrade Liang Shuming 梁漱溟, both of them being devotees of the philosophy of Wang Yangming 王陽明). He therefore considers that the primary purpose of learning the Confucian Books in school is moralistic rather than politically-inculturating; and he applies this descriptive analysis to a survey of the Chinese education system during the Republican period. He claims – somewhat provocatively – that, even though the Classics and the Christian Scriptures are taught in Chinese missionary schools and universities (and to a greater degree than in contemporary Britain or Germany), the overall character of the Chinese education system is actually laïcist, because Ruxue, as a code of conduct taught in schools, makes no sectarian claims on public space or resources, and thus does not conflict with any religious claims upon the same.

But here’s where Tao Xingzhi’s theory of moral education gets really interesting, and where the political differences between him and al-Ḥuṣrî begin to manifest themselves. When turning to the normative question of educational psychology, he notes that mere formal education in the concepts of Ru ethics is insufficient, and he points as evidence of this to the fact that such conflicts between Christian and Confucian instruction do not exist. Simple repetition, rote memorisation of concepts and meditation are insufficient in themselves to generate actual moral knowledge. Instead, political inculturation is precisely what is required of moral education. Here Tao Xingzhi begins sounding much more like Jiang Qing, to the point where he begins quoting from Xunzi 荀子 against Mencius 孟子 (and implicitly also against the Zhu-Xi school of rationalism):

When a six-year-old child begins to study Mencius or [the epistles of Saint] Paul he may appear to understand something, but in fact [his understanding] is but skin-deep. Xunzi, in criticising formal education, says:

小人之學也，入乎耳，出乎口；口耳之間，則四寸耳。

The common people’s education comes into the ears and goes out through the mouth, and therefore it is only four inches deep—the distance between the ears and the mouth.

We may safely say that ideas about morality do not guarantee the conduct we desire, and any instruction based on this ideo-motor theory [a concept borrowed from Edward Thorndike’s educational psychology] will surely find disappointment. One reason why we find little or no conflict between the instruction in Christian religion and Confucian ethics in missionary schools is because the formal instruction in both religion and morality without actual participation is without much effect on conduct.

After that, it gets even better! Tao Xingzhi even borrows from the ‘political Ru’ hermeneutical tradition of the Gongyang Commentary, and also the developmental posture which is implied by the Gongyang Commentary itself, and which is explicated by the New Text school. Even though the developmentalist framework Tao Xingzhi uses is borrowed from British-American psychologist William MacDougall’s Introduction to Social Psychology, and even though he frames the developmental posture in individual-psychological terms rather than social-historical ones, his use of classical Chinese concepts within that framework does point back to a Ru pædagogy. Ironically, this leads him to embrace a position of Christian moral independence and even kenoticism indicated by his Anglican social-gospel upbringing!

In the exertion of such an influence, we must also recognise the four stages of the development of conduct. First, we have the stage of instinctive behaviour, at which the child’s conduct is modified only by the influence of pains and pleasures. […] is the stage at which the operation of the instinctive impulses is modified by the influence of rewards and punishments, administered more or less systematically by the social environment. Third, we come to the stage where conduct is controlled in the main by the anticipation of social praise and blame [贊揚與指責; cf. the classical 褒貶 of Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒]. Finally, there is the highest stage of moral development, at which conduct is regulated by an ideal that enables a man to act in a way that seems to him right, regardless of the praise or blame of his immediate social environment.

This fourth stage suggests to me ‘the Good Shepherd’. It reads: ‘I am the good shepherd… and I lay down my life for the sheep… Therefore does my Father love me because I lay down my life, that I might take it up again.’ Up to this place nothing sounds very extraordinary, but watch that which follows: ‘No man takes it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again.’ It is such high moral power that we must take as our final goal of development. Those who take the responsibility of shaping the child’s conduct must keep in mind the progression from the first to this highest stage.

Tao Xingzhi’s basic moral instinct here is virtue-ethical, and (obviously) it is only very ambiguously sæcular. For Tao, education cannot have as its sole purpose the transmission of ‘knowledge about’, but instead must provide ‘knowledge for’ the development of excellence in character. ‘All knowledge is related to conduct’, and ‘life itself is education’. These are concepts, by the way, that he borrows straight from Wang Yangming. And the punchline of his theory of education is that political and religious inculturation is absolutely necessary. He casts this in explicitly Christian terminology – in fact, I would say explicitly Eastern Orthodox, as the language is taken from the General Intercession in our prayer-book:

In all cases, the psychological nature of the child must be recognised; social significance must be attached and opportunity for actual participation must be provided. The child, according to his stage of development, must be led to get into contact with all sorts of social needs—the poor, the sick and the suffering … In a word, he must be put in the social hot-bed of love, service and sacrifice, and educated to love, to serve and to sacrifice on his own initiative.

Now, a thoroughgoing New Text scholar like Jiang Qing is likely to find a great deal to nitpick in Tao Xingzhi’s pædagogical theory—which is absolutely fine. Tao Xingzhi has little to no fear or hope of Ru as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’; it is a mere body of ethical habit accrued among Chinese people. He is very clearly and explicitly deeply indebted to Dewey’s American pragmatism from a philosophical perspective, and his invocations of Ru social theory, even though they are clearly meaningful and deliberate, are nonetheless occasional. He is promoting a model of education that can be readily adapted to sæcular Chinese realities. Typically of the ‘heart-mind Ru’ of his time, Tao does not hold up the way of Confucius as a ‘comprehensive doctrine’, as is made abundantly clear by his recourses to the Greek Scriptures of the Christian tradition and to modern behavioural psychology. But it is equally clear that, in sterling contradistinction to Sâti‘ al-Ḥuṣrî, Tao is by no means a thoroughgoing supporter of the Franco-American laïcist educational model from a normative perspective, even though he understands full well that such a model is his ‘starting point’ in China.

Speaking personally, and again as an Orthodox Christian deeply influenced by Confucius, I confess I find myself in greater sympathy with Tao Xingzhi than I do with the sæcular Ottoman Muslim al-Ḥuṣrî – even though the Ḥuṣrîan-Khaldûnian concept of ‘asabiyya is one I find naturally intriguing and useful. On questions of religious and moral education, Tao’s mode of pædagogical explication is far more engagé, more activist and more radical than al-Ḥuṣrî’s, because it is less positivist and sæcular. But it is still an interesting point of divergence. Despite his sæcularity, as an Ottoman Arab al-Ḥuṣrî seems far more sensitive to the seductive power of ‘comprehensive doctrines’ than Tao is. Even though Tao is explicitly Christian in his religious sentiments (and explicitly Confucian in his philosophical ones), we only get to see brief flashes of awareness of the total reorienting, transformative and subversive power either of his own creed or of his own ethical habits. More often in his writing, he comes across as a kind of naturalist-evolutionary philosophical-religious eclectic.

Still, the Arab teacher and the Chinese teacher both have the same goals: the transformation of their societies into independent, self-reliant and unified polities which are capable of successfully resisting imperialist domination. And to some extent, the two of them even have similar instincts and methods! Neither of them is driven by hatred of the West to the extent that they are willing to fully turn their backs on the intellectual resources offered by it; instead the first instinct of each of them is a revolutionary kind of love for their people – a deep, burning desire for their good.