European Journal of Curriculum Studies, 2015 Vol. 2, No. 1, 182-190 “The Enlightenment was a Huge Pedagogic Project”: Reconsidering the Legacies of Anglo- American Curriculum, North European Bildung, and Chinese Wisdom Traditions amidst the Current Economic, Educational and Social Crisis Autio, Tero Tallinn University Email: tero@tlu.ee Abstract The paper is the keynote presentation in the conference at Hangzhou university, China, November 2014 that was dedicated to the publication of the research report W.F. Pinar (ed.), Curriculum Studies in China: Intellectual Histories, Present Circumstances. The presentation deals – as an attempt to theorize the present policy measures - with the present education crisis. The obsessive worldwide audit and assessment culture as an imitation of the economy in education is introducing the policy initiatives by the authoritative bodies like the OECD, EU and the US to which Finnish education policy analyst Pasi Sahlberg has referred by the concept of the GERM, Global Education Reform Movement, “a virus that is killing education”. I tentatively and shortly analyze the historical, theoretical, and theological trajectories in order to better understand historical conditionings of the present and the emerging vistas after the present crisis. In that sense, it may be that light can come from the East as the promising Chinese “liberalization and modernization reforms” in education with its hybrid encounters between Western curriculum theories and its own reactivated “Wisdom Traditions” may imply. Keywords: International politics; Curriculum theory; Neoliberalism; Protestantism; Chinese curriculum reforms. Introduction The general political atmosphere in most West countries is suffering a kind of hangover after the revanchist euphoria the collapse of the Soviet Union caused all over the Western world. The euphoria reached the measures where the social and cultural evolution of the humankind was seen by authoritative yet politically motivated commentators to witness the apex of the human history, “The End of History”, like Professor Francis Fukuyama put it in 1992. Liberal market democracy was declared as the winner in the competition about the best available blueprint for democratic society and an argument for globalized world as united, unitary wholeness tied together by market forces as a basis for politics, morals and education alike. “A major challenge of the millennium is to install freely elected democracies all over the world, under one standard for the world which is the free market system … practiced correctly” (Autio, 2009, p. 70) as the former US foreign minister Colin Powell succinctly phrased the tenor of the new capitalist times in the beginning of the 21 st century. The elevation of the market forces as the guiding beacon for all social action, politics and education as no