ABSTRACT
This paper addresses one fundamental question: is it feasible to write a genuine global history of higher education? About 75 years ago, Durkheim raised an interesting question in his lecture on the history of the University of Paris: ‘Can we really believe, for example, that to study the marvellous complexity of Indian civilization would be of less educational value than studying that of Rome, and that the humanity which it enshrines is somehow of an inferior quality?’ (1938, 324) This question has been re-formulated over time so that some scholars (de Bary and Chaffee 1982, x) have pointed out that ‘Past studies of traditional education have too much often been based on the twin assumptions of Asian backwardness andWestern superiority’. Lucas (1994, 5) revealed a selection bias in writing histories of so-called world higher education which has been ‘unabashedly Eurocentric’. He listed the following as lost traditions:
Korean Confucianism, which blossomed from the sixteenth century in Korea, is omitted even in this list. It was therefore not surprising that a Japanese scholar (Umakoshi 1990), who could not find any model of a Western university in nineteenth century Korea, made an arrogant conclusion that Korea was too retarded to have a Western university, unlike the case in Japan.
