2020

Kimonen, Eija; Nevalainen, Raimo

The aim of this chapter is to globally analyze the foundations of community-based learning with a focus on the philosophical views, educational aims, and associated value dimensions in the United States, India, and China. The previous research in comparative education leading to this analysis utilized a historico-hermeneutical approach. This chapter shows that the American philosophical tradition of community-based learning is founded on the ideas of progressive education and is based on the tradition of pragmatism and the naturalistic view of the human being held by functionalism. In India, the philosophical tradition of such learning is related to the ideas of neo-traditional education and relies on a tradition that insists on truth, as included in the philosophy of satyagraha. The Chinese philosophical tradition of community-based learning is rooted in the ideas of revolutionary education, which rely on the radical social theory of dialectical materialism. These traditions in the United States and India gave particular importance to sociomoral aims and socioethical and universal values, and in China to moral-political aims and values. The study concludes that development in the countries started to stress school-centered intellectual aims and science- and technology-related values, and community-based learning allowed experts to be trained for an advanced society in which mental work is performed in modern production.