Listening to the Young Generations on Higher Education

Lessons from the first Advisory Board of Higher Education for Good (HE4G)

More than two thousand years ago, a short Confucian text, the Great Learning, set out a sequence that still reads like a programme for education. Whoever wishes to bring peace to the world, it argues, must first govern the state well. To govern the state, one must first order one’s family, and to order the family, one must first cultivate oneself. Self-cultivation in turn rests on sincerity, on rectifying the mind and on the patient investigation of things. In this view, learning is not a stock of information but a discipline of character, and personal formation ultimately shapes the world.