At Beijing Sihai Confucius Academy

Visiting Beijing Sihai Confucius Academy (from left to right:) Pei Songxian, Feng Zhe, Thorsten Pattberg

Visit to Sihai Confucius Academy in Beijing (June 17, 2013). This academy is a private school that caters for children age 3-13 to learn Chinese classics, and to become experts and practitioners of Chinese culture. The student teacher ratio is 150 to 40, and 20 support staff. The curriculum heavily favors both Chinese and Western classics. Children board Monday to Friday at the academy and return home for the weekends.

The academy lies in the suburbs of Beijing on a mountain slide with forests, gardens, and beautiful mansions with clean and tidy halls, classrooms, playgrounds and student dormitories. Sihai Confucius Academy has successfully established itself as a brand, with its own farm product, a vegetarian restaurant chain, the Ertong education project, etc.

Moreover, Sihai Confucius Academy receives regular media attentionfrom home and abroad, hosts conferences, and publishes its own teaching materials, built from scratch its classical library, offers outdoor programs, organic farming, music classes, and is supported from famous Confucian scholars like Gu Zhengkun, Wang Caigui, Wang Dianqing, Guo Qijia, Roger Ames, He Guangrong, Ling Zi, and Tu Weiming. The list goes on.

And yes, the students here learn to recite the Dao De Jing, for example. Sometimes at the age of three. Really. [SEE WEIBO BLOG] [BACK TO MAIN]

The Confucian Way of Europe

BEIJING/SHANGHAI - Published first in China's flagship media Shanghai Daily on July 25, 2012, and China Daily as Europe's path to a new humanism on Dec 10, 2012, the article has gone viral on the internet. 

Thorsten Pattberg - Europe's Path to a New Humanism;
photo: Dong Guisheng

Here's a link to the uncensored piece entitled The East is a Promotion.

Thorsten Pattberg - The East is a Promotion Series;
photo: Dong Duisheng