Reforms in pedagogy and the Confucian tradition: looking below the surface

This Forum article addresses some of the issues raised in the article by Ying-Syuan Huang and Anila Asghar’s paper entitled: Science education reform in Confucian learning cultures: teachers’ perspectives on policy and practice in Taiwan. An attempt is made to highlight the need for a more nuanced approach in considering the Confucian education tradition and its compatibility with education reforms. In particular, the article discusses issues concerning the historical development of the Confucian education tradition, challenges in reform implementation that are in reality tradition-independent, as well as opportunities and points of convergence that the Confucian education tradition presents that can in fact be favorable to implementation of reform-based pedagogies.