Venturing into new grounds

I thought of giving a bit of an update where I am at now in my study of patriotism and its education. Last year, I received some biting criticisms about the work I have been doing. (That is why I love peer review. They dare to say it in your face.) And it made me realized I know very little about patriotism in Europe or other places besides the USA, China and Hong Kong. It made me realized, I really have to brush up on my historical knowledge and be willing to learn more about countries that I knew very little about.

In particular, I am interested in Germany and Japan, because of the major role they played in WW2 as the aggressor, and how 'patriotism' would mean something very different to them compared to other countries, due to historical reasons. I am also reading up more about patriotism in Russia and post-Soviet countries. This one is hard for me. As I was never a history student, so I don't even know who is Stalin. I have found reading academic papers on citizenship education in these countries difficult, because I lacked contextual knowledge. (Maybe I should really made a trip to Japan and visit a museum. This way of learning works for me. Being there in the country and sensing the place.)

So this is what I have been doing lately, I have put aside the USA, China and Hong Kong works, because they really skew how you think about patriotic education and the world. The American and Chinese governments are very pro-patriotism and its inculcation in schools. They can afford to. They are big countries, and powerful, and their people have a lot to be proud of. They are powerful enough to provide their people with a generally good standard of living and they have not been invaded in a big way like the other smaller and weaker states. Hong Kong also seems like it simply wants to be different from China and more like America, in the sense of wanting to be far from communism/socialism, and near to liberalism. So these three units of study are very well aligned.

But... There are countries that do not believe in patriotism in citizens. My friend told me that Spain is one of them. There's no need at all to link citizenship with patriotism. I can be a good and loyal citizen, without any emotional attachment to my country. So yes, now I am interested in these other countries. I want to see if I can form another framework of patriotism. It means I have to broaden my search of literature. Some of these works are hidden you know, in books, that are published by European publishers which I have never heard of before. So yes, that's what I have been doing. I have been reading up more about patriotism and its education in countries that are quieter about patriotism.

I believe there are probably such hidden works about patriotism in other Southeast Asian countries, like the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand... But yes... How do I find them? I would love to know more about these countries as well...

Reason VS Feeling

"The history of our culture is often experienced as a battle between reason and feeling, rationality and irrationality, logic and impulse. Because intuitive first order thinking is indissolubly mixed up with feeling, irrationality, and impulse, we end up in an adversarial situation where disciplined critical thinking and uncensored creative thinking face each other uneasily from entrenched positions. It seems as though logic and reason have just barely and only recently won the battle to be our standard for thinking, and therefore advocates of reason and logic tend to criticize all relaxations of critical vigilance. Similarly, champions of creative first order thinking sometimes feel they must criticize critical thinking, if only to win some legitimacy for themselves. But this is an unfortunate historical and developmental accident. If we would see clearly the truth about thinking and writing we would see that the situation is not either/or, it's both/and: the more first order thinking, the more second order thinking, and vice versa. It's a matter of learning to work on opposites one at a time in a spirit of mutual reinforcement rather than in a spirit of fearful combat." (pp. 30-31)

Peter Elbow in Re-thinking Reason: New Perspectives in Critical Thinking by Kerry S. Walters

Reflections on Reading the Proof for APJE

I write now to capture the immediate and most honest reactions.

I was appalled by my writing style in the first half of the paper, where I synthesized literature. I finally understood what one reviewer meant when he said, "I know what this and that guy think, but what do YOU think?" I realized in the flurry of quotation marks and my concern with rightly attributing everything to someone, I lost my voice. My friends who read my draft gave me similar feedback that the style was really bad. I was too deep into that process and too cluttered in my mind at that point to have made stylistic changes. So yes, that is evidence of amateurish writing. It is very amateurish indeed.

But when I got to the second part of the article where I am less concerned with citation and attribution, but could use my own words with ease, I wrote well. I wrote clear. I heard Shuyi's voice. I know it's my voice when I use "cute" words. I am not a very good English speaker or someone with a lot of vocabulary, so I use "cute" words to express my emotions. I love it. I can recognize Shuyi's voice. It's cute. :) And I felt I rightly highlighted the teachers' teaching style, while protecting them, by saying how sensitive they were and when they were critical, it was only out of love for the country. These two are my favourite teachers. I really think they are the most awesome teachers I've ever met.

So there you go. I have some work to do, to figure out all the Author's Queries (AQ) and how to input into the paper these corrections. Let's see how it goes now.