Browsing by Author "Jäske, Alice"

Confucianism can be considered as the most important ideology in China, because it was China’s official ideology for more than 2000 years. During this period of time it intertwined with China’s culture, and formed its own discourse to the Chinese society. Confucianism is described as a moral and as a society philosophy, which concentrates on a specific type of education and behaviour. Given this, I will analyse from this point of view how Confucian discourse is expressed in Chinese teachers’ discussion on education and their values. Furthermore, I will survey how they see that Confucianism has affected their values. My material consists of four semi structured interviews, all three of them composed of three bigger themes. Every interviewee is a Chinese teacher, who teaches Mandarin Chinese in Finland. My method of analysis is a discourse analysis, which I see appropriate because I am studying how Confucian discourse occurs in the speech of the interviewees. In my conclusions, I will introduce the three most visible main themes of Confucian discourse. The main themes are communality, seeking for harmony, and respecting the elderly because these themes can be pointed out distinctly from the discourse of the interviewees. The way that interviewees tend to use a passive structure or ‘we’ pronoun, indicates how the communality is a major part of their lifestyle. The respect for elder people and the aim to harmony is visible in concrete examples, like how they try to act obediently, and suppress their negative feelings in the conflict situations. Chinese teachers also openly agreed that Confucianism has affected their value system, since the Confucian values are taught at home subconsciously. Moreover, the values are taught at school consciously, for example by reading Confucian texts. All in all, it would be very interesting to do more research on how Confucian values can be detected in China’s education system.