Introduction: positioning, encountering, translating, reflecting

Conceptions of culture are bound to conceptions of human being and human becoming. Cultures endure through the processes of formation that they, consciously or unconsciously, initiate. But the ideas that underpin educational formation are diverse, complex, and often inexplicit. In general, a conception of human being is at stake, i.e. an anthropology which includes ideas of what a good life or educated person looks like. In particular, the relations between those educating, those undergoing education, and the subject matter of education, are thereby shaped by distinctive normative considerations reflecting the diverse cultural circumstances of their origin. This, of course, is also true for those who discuss educational concepts and practices originating in contexts other than the author’s contexts: those presentations are usually done for formative, i.e. educational reasons, and those educational aspirations also need to be reflected upon with regard to the normative anthropologies which underlie, enable and restrict the way those presentations are shaped. A book such as this, which intends to raise questions of international and intercultural comparative education must, therefore, reflect on the ways it attempts to achieve its goal, which is to participate in the dialogue between different educational cultures, or, more specifically: between our (i.e. the editors’) own cultures and those we might in a preliminary (and maybe overly hasty) step call East-Asian cultures. This collection of essays seeks to explore the Anglo-American traditions of educational trans−/formation and Germanic constructions of Bildung, alongside East Asian traditions of trans−/formation and development. Whether such juxtapositions are legitimate or worthwhile must itself be explored.