Resumen de Knowledge Diffusion and the Learning of Practical Knowledge: Case Studies of Early Modern Japan and Europe
The paper concerns comparison of the roles played by texts and objects in higher education in Western Europe, China and Japan in early modern period. As is well known in Europe the interest for the direct study of nature and properties of material objects grew during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the use of these resources in practical teaching was limited, this type of sensorial teaching method increasingly gained its importance in educational theories. Texts and objects also shed a light upon the understanding of teaching traditions in contemporary Tokugawa Japan. While reading and interpretation of Confucian texts dominated the core part in the traditional curriculum in the Japanese elite schools, Western learning particularly medicine and military techniques were increasingly incorporated into practical teaching in higher education from the late eighteenth century. The paper also examines the contrasts and interactions between this new type of teaching with traditional Chinese teaching, that is, reading and interpretation of classical Confucian texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
