Non-Western Educational Traditions

Local Approaches to Thought and Practice

Timothy Reagan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317698708
• Edition: 4
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Comparative Education

Informative and mind-opening, this text uniquely provides a comprehensive overview of a range of non-western approaches to educational thought and practice. Its premise is that understanding the ways that other people educate their children—as well as what counts for them as "education"—may help readers to think more clearly about some of their own assumptions and values, and to become more open to alternative viewpoints about important educational matters. The approach is deliberately and profoundly pedagogical, based in the author's own teaching practice. Designed to be used in pre-service and in-service teacher education courses where substantial critical discussion and debate are encouraged, the text is enhanced by Questions for Discussion and Reflection in each chapter.

Updates and Features of the Fourth Edition

• NEW! Chapter 2 exploring key features of the 'western educational tradition', and information about the contemporary educational systems in different countries

• NEW! Chapter 10 on traditional educational thought and practice in Oceania, with special focus on the Maori in New Zealand, the Hawai'ians, and the Australian Aboriginal peoples

• Updated chapter on Africa includes fuller explanation of the diversity within the indigenous African experience, as well as several contemporary cases of state education in Africa

• Updated Chapter 4 is designed to help non-Muslims to understand the Muslim educational heritage and the growing issue of Islamophobia

• Exploration of Chinese education now includes a special emphasis on the thought of Confucius, the role of the imperial examination system, and the impact of political and economic changes in the 20th century

• Updated analysis of contemporary educational practices in Hindu and Buddhist educational thought and practice and brief discussions of Jainism and Sikhism

1 NON-WESTERN EDUCATIONAL TRADITIONS

We find it pedagogically tragic that various indigenous knowledges of how action affects reality in particular locales have been dismissed from academic curricula. Such ways of knowing and acting could contribute so much to the educational experiences of all students; but because of the rules of evidence and the dominant epistemologies of western knowledge production, such understandings are deemed irrelevant by the academic gatekeepers.

—(Semali & Kincheloe, 1999, p. 15)

As Semali and Kincheloe noted in their book, What is indigenous knowledge? Voices from the academy,¹ most books and university courses that deal with the history and philosophy of education include few, if any, references to indigenous educational ideas and practices in Africa and the Americas, and relatively few references to those of Asia. While for some time there have been calls for the inclusion of the perspectives of women and people of color in studies of the history and philosophy of education, such efforts, where they have taken place, have often entailed little more than the addition of vignettes indicating the contributions of members of such groups to the western tradition. The idea that there might be valuable insights to be gained from a serious examination of non-western educational traditions themselves, indeed, that these traditions might be fully comparable to the western tradition in their richness and diversity, is one that has been rarely voiced. Furthermore, where non-western educational ideas and practices have been discussed, they are often subjected to a treatment roughly comparable to the ‘Orientalism’ discussed by Edward Said with regard to the western (and specifically, Anglo-French-American) response to Islam and the Islamic world:

Orientalism can be discussed and analyzed as the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient—dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient. … European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self.²

In other words, when scholars do try to examine non-western educational thought and practice, all too often they tend to do so through a lens that not only colors what they see, but also one that reifies the object of study, making it, in essence, ‘the Other’, and hence alien. Reification results not only in the distortion of what one is trying to understand, but also in its subjugation to one’s own preexisting values and assumptions. This problem is not, of course, unique to the study of educational thought and practice; it is a common criticism of western scholarship about the non-western world more generally. In his discussion of the study of indigenous African religions by western scholars, the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek wrote of the “systematic and intensive use of dirty gossip” in place of solid and sensitive scholarship.³ In a similar vein, the Adam Kuper described The invention of primitive society by nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropologists and social theorists in the west.⁴ In terms of traditional African educational practices, A. Babs Fafunwa commented that

Because indigenous education failed to conform to the ways of the Westernised system, some less well-informed writers have considered it primitive, even savage and barbaric. But such contentions should be seen as the product of ignorance and due to a total misunderstanding of the inherent value of informal education.⁵

At the present time, there is perhaps no better place to see this tendency at work than in the examination and treatment of the Muslim world and Islamic tradition in the west:

Since September 11, western discussions of Islam have typically been conducted through a contest of caricatures. Some analysts present Islamic extremism as a product of a ‘clash of civilizations’ that pits Eastern despotism against western individualism. Others see such extremism as a grim ‘blowback’ of America’s cold-war foreign policy. Engagement with the Muslim faith commonly takes the form of simplistic pronouncements about [the] ‘essence’ of Islam: Osama bin Laden either represents the true message of the Prophet or corrupts a ‘religion of peace’. … these discussions are driven more by western concerns—‘are Muslims dangerous or not?’—than by a serious effort to understand Islam and the place of toleration and moral decency in its conception of a proper human life.⁶

Such simplistic misunderstandings and misrepresentations remain all too common as we seek to understand the ‘Other’, and it was as a challenge to such misunderstandings and misrepresentations that this book was written.

The same can be argued with respect to western treatment of indigenous educational ideas and practices in Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and elsewhere. In short, when we speak of the history of educational thought and practice, what we have meant in the past has been the history of western educational thought and practice, and the effect of our meaning has been to dismiss and denigrate, or at the very least to delegitimatize, alternatives to the western tradition that have developed and thrived elsewhere in the world. It is discourse itself, the way that one talks, thinks about, and conceptualizes educational thought and practice, that is at issue. As Ball noted in a discussion of the work of the French philosopher Michel Foucault, “Discourse is a central concept in Foucault’s analytical framework. Discourses are about what can be said and thought, but also about who can speak, when, and with what authority. Discourses embody meaning and social relationships, they constitute both subjectivity and power relations.”⁷

The underlying purpose of this book is to begin the process by which the existing discourse in the history of educational thought and practice can be expanded in such a way as to provide a starting point for a more open and diverse view of the development of various approaches to educational thought and practice. Needless to say, this work is intended to be only a beginning. If the study of the various educational traditions discussed here is to be taken seriously, these traditions (and many others as well) will require, and are certainly entitled to, the same sort of concern that has long been accorded the western tradition. Furthermore, given their differences from the western tradition, it is essential that we learn to invite and to listen to the multiple voices and perspectives that can enlighten our understanding of these traditions, just as we must learn to recognize that different groups may, as a consequence of their sociocultural contexts and backgrounds, possess ‘ways of knowing’ that, although different from our own, may be every bit as valuable and worthwhile as those to which we are accustomed.⁸ As Carol Gilligan has suggested with respect to ‘woman’s place in man’s life cycle’,

At a time when efforts are being made to eradicate discrimination between the sexes in the search for social equality and justice, the differences between the sexes are being rediscovered in the social sciences. This discovery occurs when theories formerly considered to be sexually neutral in their scientific objectivity are found instead to reflect a consistent observational and evaluative bias. Then the presumed neutrality of science, like that of language itself, gives way to the recognition that the categories of knowledge are human constructions. The fascination with point of view that has informed the fiction of the twentieth century and the corresponding recognition of the relativity of judgment infuse our scientific understanding as well when we begin to notice how accustomed we have become to seeing life through men’s eyes.⁹

A similar kind of argument can be made with respect to the differences in perspective and worldview in non-western cultural and historic traditions. To be sure, this argument remains largely speculative in nature with respect to many of the traditions to be discussed in this book, while in the case of women there is a growing body of fairly compelling empirical evidence.¹⁰ I hope that others, from a wide array of different backgrounds, would challenge, modify, and add to the base that is offered here, and that someday the study of the Aztec calmécac and telpochcalli, of the imperial Chinese examination system and its content, and the role of various African initiation schools, among others, might be as commonly taught in courses in the history of educational thought as the study of Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey is today. I am not, of course, arguing that Plato, Rousseau, and Dewey (among others) should be eliminated; they, and many others, are important figures in the development of our own historical tradition, and certainly merit serious study. My focus is not on replacing the western tradition, but rather on trying to expand our understanding of education, broadly conceived, through the examination and study of other approaches to educational thought and practice with which many of us tend to be less familiar. Ultimately, as we better understand the educational traditions of other societies and cultures, we will also be forced to reexamine and to reflect on our own tradition in somewhat different ways, and this will be immensely beneficial to our understanding of our own traditions.

The Challenge of Ethnocentrism

As we begin the process of trying to broaden our perspectives on the history of educational thought and practice, it is important for us to understand that the activity in which we are engaged will inevitably involve challenging both our own ethnocentrism and the ethnocentrism of others. Ethnocentrism refers to the tendency to view one’s own cultural group as superior to others, a tendency common to most, if not all, human societies. However, in contemporary scholarly discourse, one seldom comes across such blatant ethnocentrism (although such ethnocentrism was not only commonplace, but largely a given in past scholarship).¹¹ Rather, what is far more common is the practice of using one’s own society and sociocultural practices as the norm by which other societies are viewed, measured, and evaluated. Ethnocentrism of this kind takes two somewhat distinct forms: cultural ethnocentrism and epistemological ethnocentrism.¹²

Cultural ethnocentrism refers to manifestations of ethnocentrism in individual scholars and their work, as well as to the sociocultural context that has helped to form and support such individual and idiosyncratic biases. We see examples of cultural ethnocentrism when scholars allow common biases, prejudices, and assumptions to color their work in various ways. Racism, sexism, linguicism, ageism, ableism, etc., all contribute to cultural ethnocentrism, most often in ways that are unconscious. Thus, the topics that a scholar chooses to explore, the questions that are asked about these topics, the framework within which hypotheses are constructed, how conflicting evidence is weighed, and even what counts as evidence can all be affected by personal assumptions and biases.

The second sort of ethnocentrism, epistemological ethnocentrism, deals not so much with individual assumptions and biases, but rather with those common to scholars in an entire discipline or field of study. With epistemological ethnocentrism, we are concerned with what the late philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn called the dominant ‘paradigm’ in a discipline.¹³ A paradigm, on Kuhn’s account, is far more than merely a model or a theory:

A paradigm is a world view, a general perspective, a way of breaking down the complexity of the real world. As such, paradigms are deeply...