Yang, Shen-keng (Sept. 1999)

An overview of the book (301 English words):

The whole scholarly book discusses the context-generalizability of comparative education discourse and its cross-cultural barriers in touching ethnomethodological and ethnographic issues by a scrutiny of the nature and types of its epistemological foundations. It entirely contains four sections.

Section one investigates the nature, sources and chronological development of human knowledge in general and of particular knowledge in comparative education. Multi-faceted issues cover internalization or localization of educational knowledge, relationships between human knowledge and teacher education and considerable impacts of modern science and information technology upon the structure and functioning of higher education globally and locally in Taiwan.

Section two brings out a penetrating comparative analysis of the socio-political and historical background and characteristics of higher (especially teacher) education in German and Greece. Learning great fruitful lessons from the (mal)functioning of their educational systems and school reforms, Prof. Yang endeavors to find out commonalities and distinctive problems of educational development between Mainland China and Taiwan and anticipates their future trends under gigantic forces of marketization, globalization and internationalization.

Based on an epistemological foundation and a theoretical framework of teacher education under the influence of several academic doctrines like constructivism, critical theory, hermeneutics and postmodernism, he makes cross-national comparisons of teacher education and reform tends in Germany, United Kingdom and the United States of America. Meantime, he also considers the feasibility of borrowing lessons to Taiwanese teachers’ professionalism from these foreign countries.

Section four uses a documentary analysis of international conferences, congresses and organizations on comparative and international education to trace out future trends of educational research in the 21st century. In particular, he addresses theoretical foundations in the field of comparative and international education and their paradigmatic shifts through conference papers, monographs and congress reports of some distinguished figures in the field under the tremendous impacts of multi-culturalism, postmodernism and socio-technocratic changes.

Background about the author:

Prof. Yang shen-keng is a distinguished figure in the fields of comparative education and philosophy of education in Asia. Earning a Ph. D. from Athens University in Greece, Prof. Yang was a professor (is currently a reader) and the director of the Graduate Institute of Comparative Education at National Chi-nan University in Taiwan. He is currently a professor in the Dept. of Education at National Taiwan Normal University and an advisory consultant in the Ministry of Education with specific research interests in philosophy of education, morality, science and values.

He once served as the president of the Chinese Comparative Education Society-Taipei (CCES-T), and as a member of the Board of Directors, Comparative Education Society of Asia (CESA). He is the author of several books entitled “Theory, Hermeneutics and Praxis and Communicative Rationality (1988). Taipei: Shita Bookstore? “Mood of Life and Educational Processes (1997). Taipei: Shita Bookstore’ and “Comparison, Understanding and teacher Education in International Perspectives (1998). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang? Winning numerous national research awards successively from 1986 to 1997, his prolific academic publications cover 200 articles, monographs and technical reports on comparative education, teacher education and philosophy of education.

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