Teachers’ attitudes toward regrets: A cultural comparative reading

Abstract

This paper addresses how universal teachers’ attitudes toward regret are bound with Chinese cultural particularity. Arguments are developed through comparative perspectives: philosophic theoretical thinking vs. qualitative interpretive thinking, ideas conceived in theory vs. ideas enacted in practice, and cross-cultural interactions between Chinese culture and Christian/modern ‘Western’ culture. A total of 113 narratives published in Chinese journals of Chinese teacher regret that were revealed by teachers voluntarily in the past four decades serve as a concrete point of departure for theoretical comparisons. The universality of two main types of human attitudes toward regret are defended, while the particularity of cultural attitudes toward regret between China and the ‘west’ (corresponding to the earlier theoretical constructs of two attitude meta-types) is supplementarily explained through the compelling contrast of anti-coronavirus policies (policies of zero COVID or not). The phenomenon of Chinese teachers’ comfortable expression of regrets in public is finally discussed for its subtlety of creative transcultural exchange.