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The argument is raised that, in an age of the networked, connected society in an information-rich environment with communication possibilities as never before experienced or made possible, the displacement of educational virtues of morality, ethics and the development of all-round human beings, by those of money, labour, power and work are speeding apace, and the disconnect between system and lifeworld is increasing. Drawing initially on the work of Habermas, in which the colonization of the lifeworld occurs by system imperatives of rationalization, labour, money and power, the paper argues that such moves are manifested starkly in discourses of the relation between education and work, and five areas are introduced in which the links operate. The marketization and commodification of education, together with its incorporation into the service of capital and labour, are attested through a short worked example of one small territory within the larger context of China. Then, taking a lead from Sertillanges and Habermas’s later work, the paper argues for: (a) a reaffirmation of the importance of moral, ethical and spiritual dimensions of education; (b) the breaking of a narrowly instrumental, capital-acquisitive view of education as serving the jobs market and social control and towards a liberating view of education as communicative action and the development of being rather than simply behaving; (c) the importance of transcendence and immanence; and, thereby, (d) moves towards the re-integration of system and lifeworld in participating subjects.
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This article suggests that attempts to date to unravel the paradox of the Chinese learner are incomplete and inadequately modeled, and that the complexities of the paradox have not yet been fittingly operationalized or alternative explanations of research data investigated. It contends that attempts either to state or to unravel the paradox are chimerical, as they risk oversimplifying a complex phenomenon, the extent and nature of which are insufficiently understood to date. The article argues that investigating the phenomenon of Chinese learners' strong performance in international measures of achievement requires researchers to operate more rigorously in their search for alternative and multiple explanations of results in terms of causality, sampling, and representing heterogeneity. Several explanations of data on the paradox are presented, and alternative explanations which might be more usefully explored are provided. The article also questions the extent to which research on the Chinese learner, with a search for a unitary set of characteristics, is not, itself, prey to totalizing, collectivist ideologies cast in unrealistic meta-narratives. Recommendations are made for further research.