Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - NIGERIA'S LITERATE ZOMBIES

I probably could but a history of education around the world is a bit much for an email list. It could be popularly abbreviated into a volume I suppose, but deserves a library. 

My ¢2 worth on the specific questions, and maybe a little of my own observations. 

Was there any culture that penetrated practically the entire globe before the spread of Western culture since about the 18th century?

I think it would date to the end of the 15th century. The Columbian exchange gave us the first global contacts. Earth is a water planet and only seafaring peoples can reach the whole globe. Indonesian cultures stretched from Madagascar to Hawaii, and had a profound impact on precolonial African culture, but Europe, beginning with Portugal, really connected the whole globe. 

Is there any other educational system that has significant influence in all continents?

We could go back to Sumeria for the measurements of angles that is basic to geometry, and the oldest writing system in the world. The European musical scale has likewise been traced back to the Middle East. I used to quiz the "Western Civ" students in graduate school about how their subject starts in the Middle East, leaves for Greece, and then comes back as European Imperialism. When did the Middle East stop being Western Civilization? Islamic civilization is as much a combination of Hebrew Monotheism (that probably originated with Akhenaton) and Socratic Philosophy as the West is, yet how different they are now! Still, it's not easy policing the borders of civilizations. Samuel Huntington buried the idea that the United States was a new civilization in a footnote because he wanted to make a case for the Atlantic relationship, and his idea that America and western Europe were the same civilization. But I digress. 

There are two issues about educational systems that need to be brought out here: 

1) modernization of the educational system. 

Modern educational systems were exported by the West and were developed there first, but they are not the traditional systems there either. The American "one room school house" had to be superseded by modern schools just as the Japanese "terakoya" schools had to be superseded by modern schools based on an American model, down to the Normal School system that filled American schools with trained teachers. How to supersede, replace, integrate, or upgrade Qur'an schools is of course a problem for Muslims. Not my problem. What's important here is to distinguish between "modern" and "western" and remember that the West went through its own traumatic process of modernization. 

2) The origin of the university system. 

There is a debate about this that I've gotten into online, and like most debates it is at least partly semantic. One school holds that a university is organized as a European style autonomous guild, and therefore originated in Europe. There is a bit of circularity in the argument, I think. Buddhist centers of learning in monasteries in India and Central Asia were also autonomous from the state. The other school holds that in a university, as opposed to a center of learning, it is the institution which gives the diploma, not the individual scholar. This would make the world's first university the Masjid Al-Qarawiyyin, in Fez, Morocco. I find it curious that the Islamic legal principle of 'ijma' al-'ulama, consensus of the scholars, is strongest in the Maliki school of law, which was taught in the Masjid Al-Qarawiyyin. 

Is it possible to study various disciplines recognized as encapsulating a good part of humanity's systematic knowledge and ignore Western thought?

I doubt it, but why would you even want to do that? Why ignore any cultures' contributions to humanity? 

Students at the philosophy department of SOAS, University of London, are calling for the radical downsizing of Western philosophers from the philosophy curriculum of a school centred on the study of Africa and  Asia

I'm not familiar with the SOAS philosophy curriculum so I don't want to wade into the debate, but I think it's impossible to fully separate eastern and western philosophy. Greek Hellenism influenced India, and through Indian Buddhism, China and Japan, in profound if sometimes subtle ways. Alexander the Great brought Hellenism to India, including the Socratic dialogue, which entered Buddhism through the 1001 Questions of King Menander, and evolved into the Zen dialogue. http://www.aimwell.org/milinda.html Islam took Indian numerals and passed them off to the West as "Arabic" numerals, including the innovation of zero, often associated with the Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of Emptiness. Humans have been exchanging ideas and mixing cultures since we became human and developed culture. That's why I object to all this nonsense about cultural "appropriation". All culture is appropriated. It's learned behavior, by definition. Unlearned behavior is instinct. There are no cultural borders that prevent one culture from learning from another, nor should we try to erect any. It wouldn't work anyway. From southern hospitality to okra to the banjo it is impossible to imagine modern American culture, especially in the South, without the profound African influence that made it what it is today. 

On Mar 2, 2018, at 06:02, Cornelius Hamelberg <corneliushamelberg@gmail.com> wrote:

Re - " the educational system did not originate in Europe and spread around the world. On the contrary, the Europeans harnessed the global educational system from every part of the world and used it to their advantage " - ( Kayode J. Fakinlede )

and Toyin's response ( I guess that John Edward Phillips could add more flesh to the bones)

As I heard on Sunday, ( perhaps a little too vague) African systems of knowledge such as (Ubuntu) saw the heart as the centre of human endeavour but arriving in Europe, Renaissance Europe took it to another level : the heart centre was replaced by the brain (head)

For Toyin Adepoju,  a brief aside ) : Many years ago (late 1970s) there was a controversy between my own teacher Baba Muktananda and his disciple Bubba Free John who later on became Adi Da

In his spiritual autobiography ChitShakti Vilas (/ The Play of consciousness ) Baba Muktanada says that his journey terminated at the Sahasrara Chakra ( somewhere above the head ) whereas according to Bubba , after arriving at the Sahasrara the kundalini curved down again and took its final resting place at the Anahata Chakra ( the heart chakra, somewhere near the middle of the chest) Bubba also made some claims about the goddess – which I dare not repeat here, or anywhere..

I was a bit confused by Bubba's claim because for some people , at the very start of the journey in this life, the Anahata Charka is already open – Allen Ginsberg for example says he was told ( I don't remember by who) that his Anahata Chakra was "already open "

It's funny you, some people see a little light , or even much light -a universe of light and think that they have arrived at "enlightenment". I know for a fact that my kundalini was violently awakened / stationed at the Muladhara Chakra in July 1977 at the Gurudev Siddha Peeth, Ganeshpuri in India ( according to all the classic signs, the perfume etc. and by midnight I had packed all my belongings and was going to make my way to see the goddess at the Vajreshwari Temple a couple of miles away and even the Ashram guards with their talk of tigers roaming up there in the hills could not dissuade me - so they had to use physical force to restrain me, and by morning the pangs of separation had subsided ( smile)

One has to distinguish between states and stations ( when a state becomes more permanent , it is a station

To be qualified as a Sufi Master, the Sufi adept makes SEVEN journeys....

On Thursday, 1 March 2018 14:07:34 UTC+1, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju wrote:

' the educational system did not originate in Europe and spread around the world.On the contrary, the Europeans harnessed the global educational system from every part of the world and used it to their advantage '

Kayode J. Fakinlede

Was there any culture that penetrated practically the entire globe before the spread of Western culture since about the 18th century?

Western scholarship took  on board ideas and practices from other parts of the world, built on this synthesis and globalized it.

Is there any other educational system that has significant influence in all continents?

Is it possible to study various disciplines recognized as encapsulating a good part of humanity's systematic knowledge and ignore Western thought?

Students at the philosophy department of SOAS, University of London, are calling for the radical downsizing of Western philosophers from the philosophy curriculum of a school centred on the study of Africa and  Asia, demanding they be taught only when absolutely necessary, but is it realistically possible to study philosophy under that name without examining the implication of the term 'philosophy', from 'philo-sophia' a Greek term conflating the emotive, the rational and the mythic, three strands of the emergence of philosophical  thinking in Greece- this is different from the argument that the Greek were the first to philosophize in the world- from the narrative, mythic philosophizing of Parmenides to the dialogical and mythic philosophizing of Plato and beyond?

The Arab philosopher and doctor Ibn Sina,is foundational in the history of medicine as Al' Khwarazimi is in algebra, but what is the percentage of Western mathematicians to mathematicians from  other cultural contexts in creating modern mathematics?

toyin

John Edward Philips  <http://human.cc.hirosaki-u.ac.jp/philips/>
International Society, College of Humanities, Hirosaki University
"Homo sum; humani nihil a me alienum puto." -Terentius Afer

<http://newworldafricanpress.com/books/000026.htm>