For centuries, Chinese women were discouraged from pursuing education so that they could be more “virtuous”. Confucius, China’s most famous thinker, educator and philosopher, would never have anticipated that 2,500 years later, his thought would be popularized among his Chinese descendants by a woman.
Yu Dan, a 41-year-old media scholar at Beijing Normal University, has attracted nationwide attention with her televised lecture series about the Analects of Confucius, written by his disciples around 475 BC…
“Confucianism contains some feudal ideas that we should abandon nowadays. For example, Confucius believed that ‘women and base persons are hard to please’. In his time, women lacked foresight and used to worry about trivia in a patriarchical society.” [Full Text]
(Photo of Yu Dan)