Article
Preservation of Confucian Values in Early Childhood Education: A Study of Experts’ and Educators’ Views
| e-ISSN | 2233-5234 |
| p-ISSN | 1976-1961 |
| Metrics | Views 0 / Downloads 0 |
Abstract
Confucian values form the core of the Chinese culture, penetrating all levels of social life, and also setthe standards for family, community and political behavior. The teaching of values is deemed to be animportant aspect of young children’s education and usually the responsibility for this is seen to rest withthe family. Much interest has been generated recently on the teaching of core values in early childhoodcurriculum in order to encourage tolerance, acceptance, trust, openness, and honesty in children.Research on Confucianism is popularly conducted in different cultural contexts all over the world.Furthermore research has shown that Confucianism continues to exert a major influence on the everydaylives of Asian communities. Given the interest in Confucian values, this research study was designed toexamine the expressed views of three cohorts of professionals in Hong Kong about the preservation ofsuch values and their application to early childhood teaching. This study confirmed the view that there isa need to preserve cultural values to enable the child to be accepted in the society, especially with thevalue of ‘Ren’ helping one to learn how to interact with others and with the value of ‘Li’ further definingthe appropriate behaviour in this interaction.