WHAT IS WESTERN EDUCATION?

[toyin adepoju]

This essay is inspired by a discussion of the Nigerian Islamic terrorist sect  Boko Haram's  alleged rejection of  Western education. In trying to address the roots of the Boko Haram threat it is important to try to understand the educational system they are described as  rejecting.

Such a study is also important for the philosophy of education and comparative education. It is important in the effort to design educational systems. 

                                                                                                         What is Western Education?

                                     

                                                                                                                                                                                          Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

 

Western education may be defined in various ways. 

 

Metaphysical and Epistemic Description

 

One of these methods of definition is in  terms of the nature and sources of the metaphysical and epistemic roots of knowledge that structure an educational curriculum.

 

Structural Character of Cognitive Systems

 

By 'nature' in reference to a body of knowledge or a structure of ideas, I refer to the contents of a body of knowledge in terms of an organisation of a body of ideas into a correlative unit. This involves a consideration of the individual character of each of these ideas and the manner in which they are interrelated within the cognitive system. When you have such a cohesive unit, designed to be used as a template guiding the development of further knowledge, you have a cognitive system. Such cognitive systems are at the centre of educational systems. Various civilisations, at various points in their history, may be defined in terms of the formal and informal development and application of the cognitive systems privileged by that civilisation.

 

         Metaphysical and Epistemic Roots

 

By ‘metaphysical roots’, I refer to the conception of the nature of the cosmos  that underlies an educational  curriculum. With reference to metaphysics, I mean ideas about the nature of existence, in what sense a phenomenon can be said to exist  and the relationship between the various existents or forms of being that constitute the cosmos. Every educational curriculum can be described as structured in terms of a metaphysical framework. That metaphysical framework demonstrates a cognitive, social   and even geo-political history.

 

In  referring  to epistemic roots’, I refer to the ideas and practices about the nature of knowledge, how to assess the validity of knowledge claims and apply knowledge that are privileged in an educational curriculum. These epistemic roots  again demonstrate a  cognitive, social and  geo-political history.

 

               Metaphysical Roots

 

One could describe the current metaphysical  roots of Western education and perhaps even of Western society as founded in the  European Enlightenment, as demonstrated by a focus on the human  being as 'the measure of all things', as the central point of reference for understanding the cosmos. The conception of the human being that is privileged within this scheme is again one that achieved prominence in the Enlightenment, a human person defined primarily by their powers of reason.

 

              Epistemic Roots

 

That observation leads to the epistemic roots of Western education. The epistemic roots of Western education consist in a focus on the publicly assessable use of reason as the primary method for arriving at knowledge. By publicly assessable, I mean that the use of reason in such contexts should be such as to be capable of assessment by others using their own reason.

 

             Pervasiveness of and Selectivity in the Metaphysical and Epistemic Roots

             of Western Education

 

These metaphysical and epistemic conceptions are so fundamental  to contemporary Western scholarship and education that they are often invisible in terms of being questioned by those who practice them. They are challenged from time to time, however. Examples  of this are efforts to contextualise  the use of reason by post-modernists, by demonstrating the relationship between mind and body and  the role of the non-rational, along with other examples across the centuries.

 

The fact that these metaphysical and epistemic  conceptions are not automatic but represent choices made out of a set of possibilities is demonstrated by the fact the actual metaphysical and epistemic conceptions that inform and are demonstrated in the conclusions of the work of seminal figures in Western are not always identical with what I have just described as central to Western thought. The current conceptions that define Western education were not always dominant at various periods of Western history, as in the Middle Ages, for example. 

 

Descartes, Newton, Plato,  Kant, Johannes, Kepler, among others, cannot be described purely in terms of those metaphysical and epistemic conceptions, and yet, the educational system to which they have become central is based on those metaphysical and epistemic roots that represent only an attenuated form of their multi-faceted achievement. 

 

 Geography and Race

 

One could also describe an educational system that characterises a civilisation, in this case, Westerrn civilisation, in terms of the  geographical locations and races of the figures subsumed within and privileged by that educational system. With reference to Western education, to the best of my knowledge, its seminal figures in terms of ideas about the nature of the cosmos and the character of knowledge are fundamentally European. This tradition has been carried beyond Europe through migration and colonialism, to North America, Australia, Africa, and Asia. I don't know anything about education and scholarship in South America so I can't comment on that sub-continent. 

 

Developments since the closing years of the twentieth century have introduced North Americans, Asians and Africans into the canon of Western scholarship but I doubt if these new figures have made fundamental changes to the conceptions of the nature of the universe and the character of knowledge established by European thought. I would need to know more about these developments, though, to adequately assess the degree to which this is true, which I think it is.

Exceptions?

 

Seeming exceptions to this description of the foundations of Western thought and Western education as being in Europe, Europe as it existed before the emergence of  a multicultural concentration of thinkers and writers in European society could be described as reinforcing this argument by demonstrating strategies  of selection and assimilation through which Western scholarship and education has defined itself as a distinct brand.

 

           St. Augustine of Hippo

 

Such exceptions would seem to be, for example, St. Augustine of Hippo, the North African scholar and man of religion who occupies a  seminal position in various fields of Western thought where he has been a point of reference since he passed away in the 5th century. No comprehensive survey of  various branches of Christian theology, of aesthetics, metaphysics,  philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, autobiography and the philosophy of history in the Western tradition  is complete without a discussion of Augustine's consistent influence on European scholars and writers, an influence that is reflected in the manner in which these European thinkers  have shaped Western thought. 

 

Augustine's influence on European thought, the ground of Western thought, was possible because Augustine was thoroughly assimilated to Christian civilisation as it existed within and beyond Europe as propagated by the Roman Empire, of which Augustine was a member in his native Tagaste and Hippo, where he was bishop, a region described as in present day Tunisia. This assimilation involved his being steeped in classical European thought and the dominant  European religion of his time, Christianity, as represented by  classical mythology and philosophy, particularly Neo-Platonism, which he transmuted in contact with the Bible and other fundamentals of Christianity, an assimilation also demonstrated   in what  is described as his magnificent Latin style, Latin being of course the official language of the Roman Empire, an assimilation also evident in his  identification with the European metropolis as a point of reference, as shown by his pilgrimage to see his much admired Bishop Ambrose in Milan.

 

Augustine may therefore be described as thoroughly Europeanised. In an era before the description of colonised peoples, particularly Africans, as not worthy of learning from by the coloniser, Augustine's Europeanisation enabled his assimilation within European thought from as late as Anselm of Canterbury in the 11th century  to as recent as Martin Heidegger in the mid-twentieth century. 

 

                Arab Thought

 

Another seeming exception is the transmission of ancient Greek thought to Europe in the Middle Ages by the Arab scholars. Western scholars assimilated the Arabic contribution but these  Arab scholars did not subsequently play a significant role in Western philosophy. An exception to this blanking out could be Ibn Sīnā,, better known as Avicenna, whose pioneering work in medicine seems to have been subsumed into Western medicine.

 

          Mathematics

 

Other seeming exceptions are in mathematics, where insights from various civilisations have been interpreted   by Western science and their sources acknowledged. That acknowledgement, however,  seems to still privilege Western and particularly European scholars  as the foundation of what is known as mathematics in the modern sense. I don't know enough about mathematics to know if this view can be challenged. . There are non-Western mathematicians  in the more recent mathematical canon, like Ramanujan, but they seem few to me.

 

I am not  informed enough on the sciences to give a thumbnail survey on them in relation to those issues but I suspect that the same point might hold there.

Selectivity in the Development of Western Education

Western valorisng of Western civilisation  through the character of its educational system has been central to the creation of  a body of knowledge and of strategies for disseminating  knowledge that can be correctly  described as Western education. This process of valorising one's own civilisation by excluding  ideas and achievements from other civilisations  in the process of building one's own educational system emerged for a number of reasons.

These reasons could be described as including  lack of access to information about other civilisations,  difficulties of understanding those civilisations and relating them to the social and individual experiences of Europeans, whose history is at the centre of Western education, as well as efforts to valorise Western civilisation at the expense of other civilisations, along with what seems to be a process of selection from the achievements of seminal figures of Western thought, who could be described as encapsulating a multi-faceted scope of achievement that their descendants  were not able to integrate in its  entirety  but could assimilate only piecemeal into Western education as it developed over the centuries.

 The selections eventually arrived at  from the  works of these  seminal figures and emphasised in the educational system  can be described as arrived at through various processes, one being through the outcome of battles for legitimacy between  various cognitive paradigms, paradigms defined in terms of particular metaphysical and epistemic perspectives and their related cognitive histories.

Emerging Changes

 

Changes might be emerging to these paradigms, as represented, for example, by the presence of Asian thought in various disciplines, as in philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

 

Examples of these are Self, No Self? : Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological  and Indian Traditions, published by Oxford UP( 2010) , The Measure of Things: by David Cooper, which draws on Buddhist and European secular philosophers,  again published by Oxford UP (2002) and  Ornella Corazza's essays and her book Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection published by Routledge (2008)  which draw significantly   on Japanese philosophy. Corazza describes her research as to developing " new strategies to enhance our lifestyle by bridging science and Oriental traditions."

 

For these initiatives to be described as significantly   affecting Western thought would require not only discussion of them in isolation from European roots of the Western tradition, which might have been the position before the last 50 years or more, to the recent correlative discussion represented  by the two Oxford UP books, to rethinking  the foundational ideas of inherent in this educational system, as Corazza seems to be doing, all the way to creating curricula that reflect such re-evaluations  in terms of  how people are thought to search for and validate knowledge.

 

An educational system based on  different metaphysical and epistemic conceptions, drawing from a different style of privileging cognitive history, could approach the entire body of global knowledge differently. 

 

        The Potential of India

 

Such systems might emerge in India, for example, which is engaged in vigorous publishing of all kinds of books, and republishes under licence books on India published  in the West and sells and exports these books at cheaper  prices  than the Western originals – the West in this instance being  European and North American, particularly US publishing companies.

 

 Perhaps the Indians will develop a system that correlates their own indigenous  educational systems with the Western system they got through colonisation  by England.

 

The perspectives expressed in this essay might be simplistic in some ways, but they could be useful for characterising the relevant issues.

 

17 January 2012

Also posted at

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[toyin....@mail.utexas.edu]

FUEL SUBSIDY REMOVAL PROTEST: A POSTSCRIPT

AYO OLUKOTUN

 

In scope, sweep and significance the recent somewhat continuing protests against the removal of the so-called oil subsidy by the federal government featuring over 110% jump in the price of petrol are the most magnificent in our history comparable only to the anti-annulment upheaval of June, 1993. Over 25 lives were lost most if not all of them in direct encounters between law enforcement and protesters while official sources put the loss of revenue occasioned by the strike at N300billion. The protest themselves a spectacular outpouring of angst and anger invented like those of 1993 novel rebellious communication outlets; took on sometimes aspects of a carnival in which star musicians and comedians regaled an unprecedentedly huge audience with anti-establishment lyrics as well as employed the emergent social media to rail at, mock or denounce state officials. The political volcano had all the makings of a bourgeoning class war featuring a vivid and gargantuan interrogation of what is perhaps best described as a process of attempted reforms without reformers. Interestingly too, Nigerians in the diaspora took up the gauntlet as they made common cause with a civil society beleaguered by what is in some respects a syndrome described famously by Cameroonian scholar Mbembe as the infinite capacity of the post-colonial state to inflict pain on its hapless subjects. 

It is necessary to recapitulate the germane dimensions of this extended subversive dialogue because Professor Paul Collier of Oxford University writing in the Financial Times of Monday completely in my view misread the protest which he described as a "tea party-style folly" as a case of the poor demonstrating for the retention of the privileges of the rich. Collier argues that fuel subsidy benefitted only the rich and that if the poor knew enough they would applaud rather than berate its removal by government. It should be noted in response to this argument that a number of influential commentators including the former Minister for Petroleum Resources Prof. Tam David West maintains that a subsidy only exists in the context of the inability or feigned inability of the state to run its own refineries as well as the exploitative sleight of hand in which the cost of producing and refining petrol is computed by reference to the opportunity cost in terms of import price equivalent rather than as should have sensibly been the case the actual cost of producing and refining petrol within Nigeria. Take along with this the stupendous racketeering and swindle which characterize the oil sector teeming with well heeled importers, state officials, and colluding regulatory agencies and you begin to get a drift of the Pandora's Box which led Nigeria to the tragic dark alley which occasioned last week's social tornado. In the aftermath of the protests, government has promised to sanitise the oil industry and bring to book both corrupt officials and the profiteering importers; although the question naturally arises whether this promise should not have been the first order of business in a policy universe which announces itself as a transformatory agenda.

Over time and as a result of the advent of a succession of chaotically inept governments which are long on promises but short on performance, Nigerians have come to regard the relatively low price of petrol as the only welfare benefit they derive from a state which has practically orphaned them by denying them such amenities as good roads, potable water, regular electricity, healthcare, and a host of others which are more or less taken for granted in other countries including some in Africa which do not have oil.  

It is this context of a monumentally under-performing political and military elite in which hard currency goes into the private pockets of rotating and recycled power mongers while the people are fed with attractive slogans and promises which come to nought that provides the backdrop for the recent social upheaval. As I argued in a recent article entitled Mathematics of Distrust, a long suffering people, used to violated pledges cannot be blamed for not trusting that government would honour a deal in which they are asked to pay astronomically more for an essential commodity in exchange for a doubtful arrangement in which they are offered palliatives which only scratch the surface of their woes. Admittedly, the Jonathan government alone is not to be blamed for this accumulated and vexed distrust of official rhetoric but if its sometimes severe reaction to popular protest is anything to go by, it is yet to grasp the relationship between governmental performance, accountability and social trust. For example, as the crisis snowballed from snydicalist dispute with government into more generalized, eruptive social discontent government officials continued to talk down at protesters and engaged in lecturing a clearly intemperate and distraught nation on the wonderful benefits it will derive from projected ameliorative measures.

Even in the best of circumstances, and in the most propitious governance clime, a price jerk of almost 120% on a vital commodity would be considered outrageous if not extremely disdainful of the populace. In the extremely distressing milieu in which life has become raw and nasty for most Nigerians, the strange New Year gift of an intolerable new price regime was regarded as a declaration of war on Nigerians. Indeed, so bizarre were some of the policy pronouncements and actions including for example, the gratuitous deployment of soldiers to Lagos that one of our brilliant columnists wondered aloud if there were some in power who were secretly working for the dismemberment of Nigeria as presently constituted. I have also myself queried the rationale behind government taking on the big fight of removing so-called petroleum subsidy at a time when the activities of Islamic insurgents were bringing the nation perilously close to the brink of cataclysm on the scale of a civil war. Obviously, we would not get answers to all of these puzzles; but it is clear that more stamina, more thoughtfulness and more innovativeness would have to be brought into governance in the wake of the recent social uprising. Urgent for instance is the need for government to abandon a creeping authoritarian temptation to which it has become increasingly prone before and during the anti-subsidy removal protest, if only to guarantee the survival of our besieged democracy.                

Instead of spending time and money on adverts which convey no further information than the predictable exploitation of popular protest by opposition politicians -as if that is not what their business is - government should concentrate on tackling the fundamental malaise and deprivation which ignited the protest and brought the country to the brink of anarchy. The Jonathan government has a fighting chance of proving its critics wrong that the Kolade committee is no more than another time buying arrangement; beyond that it should push itself and the nation hard in the direction of affordable and reasonable petroleum prices by getting the refineries to work and bringing to book as it has promised the racketeers that brought us to this sorry pass.

 

Olukotun is a Professor of Political Science at Lead City University, Ibadan

[kenneth harrow]

dear toyin (et al, including la vonda)
at what point does arithmetic cease to be the property of a metaphysical aspect of a given culture or region and become universal? i know there have been different counting systems from different cultures, but i don't know of any schools that teach 5 based rather than 10 based arithmetic.
the same goes generally for the sciences  you listed.
there are disciplines that are tied to performance, like art and music, that might retain a certain measure of regional or cultural difference, but increasingly it is my impression that educational systems around the world, the entire world, are approaching subject matter in similar ways.
in other words, i agree with the premisses with which you begin your essay, but begin to disagree when you worry whether st augustine is western or not. not only is the roman empire a mediterranean one that encompassed n africa, the differences between cultures of regions today have nothing to do with the past, and the notion that there are identity formations that correspond to knowledge formations strikes me as unreal.
la vonda is right that we arrive at epistemological positions that vary from place to place. we see the world different. but we study the same texts in the same manner, more and more. it strikes me as old-fashioned to go back to laura bochanan's essay on reading shakespeare in africa, as though africans were never exposed to shakespeare and could read him only in terms of their own closed cultures.
indeed, i would expect my african students probably to have read more shakespeare than my american students--no fooling. if they read him differently, i doubt it will be reduced to some village understanding as opposed to a hypothetically more sophicated urban reading that knows how to take into account renaissance thinking. my students have not heard of the renaissance for the past 30 years--more or less.
that's why i said "western."
as an identity position, it is too weak since the epistemological premisses are there in african education, and are so far from any western regionalism now as to be free floating.
3&3=6  no one thinks in terms of original arabic numbers, greek computation, egyptian calculations, etc. that is not how it is incorporated any more; it is too widespread, and for too long to have sustained a cultural difference where we could say 3&3=11 (in a 5 based system).

so, i am not saying that the knowledge, metaphysics, etc, are western--any more. they have become dominant in a world-knowledge system, and have lost their original regionalism.
not always good, but the way it is.
if not, please show me where it bumps up against other systems that are identifiably different and actually embraced
to rephrase it, since i am teaching wallerstein tonight, don't we need to reconfigure the world-system within which education functions, so that it is no longer geographically based? if there is a struggle within the islamic world for a definition of what constitutes that world (as there has been for quite a while), and if that definition isn't simply whether you believe int he 12th imam or not, then what factors define it? boko haram, i am guessing, like other islamist groups, want that islam world-system to be defined in some way as to exclude much of the metaphysics and epistemologies  you detailed below. to replace the rational science domination with credos. that battle was lost in the west, as you indicated, since the enlightenment.
but i am asking, now, where has it not been lost in the current world??
ken

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kenneth w. harrow 
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[La Vonda R. Staples]

I didn't see it as one directly relative to Boko Haram.  I saw this question as one which needs to be discussed in higher ed.  When is an answer wrong?  When an "external" theory is applied to another culture, how can the "internal (culture being studed)" be "wrong?"  That's what I want to know. 

 

Simple discussion:  Many years ago western theorists said that cornrows damaged the scalp and therefore hair.  This was after the movie "10" with Bo Derek.  Western culture woke up one day and saw White women suffering damage.  A blanket assessment of the practice of millenia was wrongly applied. 

 

In Western thought, cornrows are harmful.  From the Afrocentric perspective the converse is truth. 

 

So, there is a Western school of thought and it proceeds, far too often, in abject ignorance and disdain for older cultures and philosophy. 

 

La Vonda Staples

 

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La Vonda R. Staples

Writer and Historian

St. Louis MO

lrst...@gmail.com

http://lavondastaples.blogspot.com/

 

“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

 

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, This Child Will Be Great; Memoir of a Remarkable Life by Africa's First Woman President.

[Abidogun, Jamaine]

I have to say I have watched this e-mail string with much interest. This topic is actually the main focus of my research - cultural and educational transformation due to historically imposed western education institutions in Anglophone Africa.  There are a couple of things I find interesting here. First is Toyin’s use of Western education’s curriculum and philosophical theories to frame his perspectives as it goes a long way to demonstrating the second item – Ken’s perception that at some point, what was once western is now universal.  La Vonda’s example below gets to the heart of a complex and ever-changing situation and one that continues to be in sore need of redress.  Western education as historically imposed and, now arguably, neo-colonially imposed systems continue to marginalize and even lose Indigenous knowledge.  It is an ongoing process that ebbs and flows.  At times specific events bring it to our attention, for example I wrote a chapter on Traditional medicine and education using events in Nsukka, Nigeria. In this case an internationally funded biochemical lab was working with a local bio-chemist to identify the active ingredients in local medicines in order to standardize dosage (which has a funny background story in itself).  Interestingly, the bio-chemist described the dilemma as he explained that he studied under his father, who was an herbalist in Igbo society.  As a child this biochemist, as so many others during and after colonialism, attended Christian dominated schools. It doesn’t matter, as most of us know, if you go to a government run or private school,  the Western Judeo Christian or Islamic doctrine (depending on majority population) is a formal part of Anglophone African school curriculums as well as an informal part that frames almost everything else in the school.  Long story short – this man was told to give up Traditional religion, which he did, but also that the medicine that his father knew was of no consequence and because its practice was often tied with spiritual practice should be left to die with his father.  To this man’s credit, he did not reject or abandon the knowledge of his father or his people.  After years in western education systems as opposed to Igbo indigenous education system (which is not a “closed” society but has pedagogical connections across West African societies), this man made a decision to work with the herbalists in his area and promote the medicine by  working with them to find ways to maintain their knowledge base and also their standing in a world that increasingly credits Western medicine over other indigenous medicine.  Of course the story is complicated by the role of the biochemical lab, which in all probability is in search for a way to make money off of indigenous medicine.  In the meantime this biochemist continues to work hand in hand with local herbalist so that indigenous knowledge is preserved.  It is after all (this is the important point) endangered knowledge.

 

Endangered by neo-colonial systems of education that literally separate children from indigenous education systems and that continue the “Christianization” and “Islamization” of Africa and therefore reduce Traditional Indigenous knowledge to a  marginalized area on the brink of extinction.  There is a real transforming (political, social, cultural, psychological) aspect that is very dangerous if left unchallenged that historically and currently maintains a western biased hierarchy in African leadership of a western educated elite and an indigenous “semi-educated” mass.   Three books come to mind as I write this, Ngugi’s Decolonizing the Mind and Moving the Center and bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress.  Of course there are scores of writers on critical pedagogy (which deconstructs the political and social role of western formal education) and indigenous knowledge (which seeks to identify and retain indigenous education systems and knowledge). Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire are probably best known in critical and related liberation education theory respectively.  George Sefa Dei, Cati Coe, and Njoki Nathani Wane are a few African education writers on indigenous knowledge.  As I am currently working on a monograph on Anglophone African gender identity change and  formal education’s role in it; this e-mail string highlights how we are all conditioned to varying degrees by the education that allowed us to write these words.  In the end the point is NOT to stop sharing knowledge or get rid of formal education, but to become aware that there is a lot more to share than what was inherited through western curriculums and eastern curriculums and second there are a lot more ways to learn than just by the book.  Or as my biochemist friend said based on his westernization education, “no need to throw the baby out with the bath water.”  Some African governments have officially recognized this specific area of indigenous knowledge (medical), like Ghana who has set up a center dedicated to identifying and categorizing indigenous medicines.  Your discussion is very interesting as it helps us look inward and outward regarding what, as academics, we hold most dear – our education.

 

Cheers,

Jamaine

[kenneth harrow]

i keep getting caught up in the loose, and ultimately meaningless use of the term western.
toyin did a good job in historicizing it and giving it some specificity.
but much as i follow and nod in agreement with you, jamaine, you keep coming back to it loosely, broadly, as if it were self evident, just as you do with eastern, etc. it just doesn't work. you can't tie a piece of knowledge, or a knowledge system, to an identity, and let identity politics end our thinking about it. for instance, why don't you say "western" biochemist instead of just biochemist?

 identity markers have to be made historically specific, as toyin did, or else they are useless. and secondly, most importantly for me, knowledge is like food, like crops, like words--they travel, they get absorbed away from their points of origin, usually under conditions of unequal power; they get transformed, that is, reterritorialized, exactly as homi bhabha said in that famous chapter, Signs Taken for Wonders, where he describes how indigenous indian people took that thing, the bible, and made it their own.
is there a single culture on earth, a single one, that has not done that? that is, imported knowledge/information/beliefs from others, from the outside, from across the borders, from the immigrants who arrived and had pizzas, and then made it their own, made it domino's pizza, made it something different from the napoletano origin, or the siciliano origin. and then what, ogun in brazil becomes a new kind of mestizo god, just like jesus in fact, like all gods everywhere. all gods, like all words: an amalgam of what had come before, with, magic, no point of origin, just repetition, change, difference.
i am sure most people on this list can tell me, in my naivete and ignorance, whether the christian churches we have made so much of in recent weeks, are the same in port harcourt as those in lansing or baltimore or bristol or avignon. i, who know only a little, already have witnessed great differences. do they remain "western"? don't they become "african"? and then, once african, aren't they actually ready to be exported again?
that said, jamaine i agree with your main point, about the inequality in power between knowledge systems, the need to protect or be aware of indigenous ones. i agree, as do many when faced with american university systems and values, that they are dominant. i agree with liberationist educators; but not on the basis of nativism.
ken

-- 
kenneth w. harrow 
distinguished professor of english
michigan state university
department of english
east lansing, mi 48824-1036
ph. 517 803 8839
har...@msu.edu

[La Vonda R. Staples]

How could you have written any of that with a straight face?  You know EXACTLY that the term has validity.  If you don't know this...?  I just don't know what to tell you or say to you.  We're at an impasse.  Mwalima Abidogun crafted a response with depth and you did not reply in kind.   It's not necessary that you agree or even concede a point, however, you resorted to a slightly elevated form of school-yard name calling.  And that's completely beneath you.  

[Abidogun, Jamaine]

I realize that the labels are broad and that is why case study and periodicity are necessary to bring specificity to each historical and current situation.  That aside, I purposefully used broad/loose labels to encompass what is a fairly broad discussion on this e-mail string.  While all your comments make sense and I agree that few if  any would argue that knowledge remains static in the hands of its receivers (students) and translators (teachers); the systematic picking and choosing of what is included and what is excluded and what types of knowing are valued are what creates the problem.  To bring more to my case in point; it is not by happenstance that the Igbo “western” trained biochemist in Nsukka attended a Christian school toward the end of colonialism or after independence in Nigeria.  The British had a common core policy in “British Tropical Africa” (drafted in 1925 ) that officially stated their preference to give government grants to mission schools and actively supported the promotion of the missions’ religion within independent and government schools along with the promotion of appropriate technical and vocational training to advance colonial needs.  I am not reducing my argument to “nativism”; I am stating that Indigenous education systems; just like Western education systems  (in this case the Igbo and British/Catholic mission) contain knowledge and institutional structures that contribute to societal constructs, i.e. political, religious, social, etc… and thus contribute to identity and cultural formation. That is why my focus is identification of the interaction of Indigenous structures and the newer Neo-colonial structures (both historical and current).  The ebb and flow that I referred to is the dynamic nature of culture and knowledge – which I think you are referencing in your examples of how people make knowledge their own.  I don’t see it as identity politics; I see it as a lived historical reality that case by case is played out in the current nation-state education context.  Please do not confuse my work with “nativism” that reduces African ethno-nations to cultural artifact boxes and stereotypes of chiefs and lions and tigers or a false ideal of what Traditional religion or Indigenous education systems offer that “western” education does not.  It is just a reality that an imposed education system by necessity marginalizes or negates what is a threat to its imposition and promotes what justifies and secures its position. Part of deconstructing the “colonial” mind has to be the deconstruction of  what the mind takes in and what it loses or, in this case, what it has access to and what it does not.  I completely agree that this process has to be specific to the histories of the people involved and their experiences in negotiating education.  Having said that, due to specific historical patterns of British colonial operations and similarities within certain African ethno-nations and 20 years of research in this area in Ghana, Nigeria, and Jamaica, I am cautiously certain that there are some common threads that cut across Anglophone African colonial and post-colonial educational experiences.  That is the focus of my current work - to explore, compare, contrast and document the historical and lived negotiation of these educational experiences (imposed and indigenous within specific ethno-nations).

 

I know you are skilled at coaching the details out of your students and colleagues alike. Thanks so much for the conversation. 

 

Cheers,

Jamaine

[Pius Adesanmi]

"indian people took that thing, the bible, and made it their own" - Ken

Hey Ken:

But you and I know that it ain't theirs, abi? Despite their appropriation/domestication manoeuvrings, the Indians too know that the Bible ain't theirs, abi?  Baba Egbe mo eye omo tobi (the neighbourhood patriarch knows the exact number of his own biological children even if he calls every child in the neighbourhood "my child").

Pius

 

---

From: La Vonda R. Staples <lrst...@gmail.com>
To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, 18 January 2012, 22:53

[kenneth harrow]

it all changes, pius. i mean, take any religion whatsoever. at what point did the early christians decide they weren't jews, and that jews weren't them. it took centuries, but eventually the appropriation became ingrained, to the point where the one attempted to eliminate and stigmatize the other.
i can't imagine the millions and millions of muslims and christians in africa being told, it ain't yours, its foreign, its western, why don't believe in your own gods.
well, what i am saying seems pretty obvious: where did those gods come from?
if the neighborhood patriarch knows his own, what does he know 1000 years later?
if we want to say, you are kikuyu, write in kikuyu since that is who you are, what language are  you permitted to use in asking that kikuyu self what it is? where does that kikuyu self reside. if it is in the kikuyu language, do we take out the kikuyu loan words that signify the changing identity of kikuyu? and if it is wolof, do we aim for the authentic village wolof, or the inauthentic mixed wolof of dakar.
i know, our friend boris diop wants the unmixed variety, but this is in the spirit of wolof revival, like the gaelic revival. every move grounded in a claim for our own, our own children, our own language, our own literature, is an attempt to freeze the moment as though the changes and mixtures had never occurred, and were somehow to be stopping. as if the one who demands the revival were not ignoring that non-revival language with which he demands the revival take place. if wa thiong'o hadn't been james, he wouldn't have written "decolonizing the mind."

besides, i know that patriarch you are talking about, and he ain't telling you about all his early adventures
ken
p.s.while we are at it, tell me,  is rock and roll white or black?

[Biko Agozino]

THE PEDAGOGY OF BOKO HARAM

 

By Biko Agozino

 

 

When Boko Haram is reported as saying that Western education is sin or forbidden, they are not saying anything new for even European thinkers have made similar critiques from Socrates, through Marx to Derrida and Foucault, without always being greeted with the exhibitions of hysterical and murderous authoritarian populism of the sort exhibited by security forces in 2002 and again in 2011 when dozens of suspected followers and leaders of Boko Haram were reported to have suffered extra-judicial execution in Nigeria perhaps because they posed a military challenge to adherents of western education as if massacring those who appear better educated in the western sense would even the field in blissful ignorance.

 

To say that western education is suspect for an African is to agree with a whole school of thought exemplified by Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, one of the Founding Fathers of Pan-Africanism who observed that: ‘We must not suppose that the Anglo Saxon methods are final…we must study our brethren in the interior, who know better than we do the laws of growth for the race.’ – Dr Edward Wilmot Blyden, The Aims and Methods of Liberal Education for Africans, inaugural address as President of Liberia College, January 5, 1881. Can even Boko Haram teach us anything valuable?

 

What Blyden was suggesting, especially in his book on Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, is that some of the teachings of Islam are more relevant to Africans than simple mimicry of white men. Although he focused on the absurdity of black Christians being taught to wish that they were blue-eyed and snow-white like a western-self image of God, we could use the example of the prohibition of alcohol consumption by Islam to promote public health in Africa. This should be taught more widely in Africa given that one of the reasons why violence is so endemic and public health so poor in Africa is that alcoholism is not recognized as the disease that it is. In such matters of addiction, education would be more effective in getting people to drink in moderation or to abstain than force or terrorism as America discovered when alcohol was prohibited, leading to the quick ending of prohibition.

 

In another sense, western education is indeed forbidden (Haram) to the masses of the people and can only be acquired often through personal struggles with significant sacrifices and it is often dished out miserly and grudgingly by the western elites to a select few. As ‘children of books’ or umu akwukwo (students), we knew this very well and so used to sing as we marched from the assembly ground to the ‘houses of books’ (classrooms): ‘Books are sweet-sweet but they are hard to learn (imuta, literally, give birth to), if you have patience, you will learn (muta, or give birth to) books, provided your mother and your father have money’.

 

This astonishing thirst for ‘western’ education by a people who were traditionally educated in the science, arts and crafts through hands-on Afrogogies (not pedagogies) for centuries was earlier noted among the descendants of enslaved Africans who helped to defeat the slave-holding sates in the American Civil War and demanded in return that public funds should be made available for the education of the poor rather than leave education in the hands of philanthropists and missionaries or price it out of the reach of the masses of the poor. Accordingly, W.E.B. Du Bois credits the founding of public education in the southern states of America to black initiative and called for at least 10% of black leaders to be given opportunities to gain higher learning rather than be satisfied with only training in the crafts or they would remain subordinate laborers in America. As he put it:

 

‘This, historically, has always been the danger of aristocracy. It was for a long time regarded as almost inevitable because of the scarcity of ability among men and because, naturally came to regard himself and his whims as the only end of civilization and culture. As long as the masses supported this doctrine, aristocracy and mass misery lived amiably together.’ - W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address’ in Boulé Journal 15 (October) 1948, 1-3.

 

The western colonial authorities were very mean with building enough ‘houses for books’ (uno akwukwo in Igbo or ufot nwed in Efik, probably ile akowe in Yoruba and gida boko in Hausa). For example, the British only established four secondary schools in Nigeria between 1909 (when Kings College Lagos was established) and 1929 when the three Government Colleges of Kano, Ibadan and Umuahia were established. They rightly suspected that the more schools they built, the greater chances that they would be training more gravediggers of colonialism. Accordingly, they screened the students and selected only those who had promise as Obedient Boys of the Empire (OBE) for further training in Europe or in colonial university colleges. Our people resisted by building their own schools through communal efforts and healthy rivalry between missionaries, towns, families and individuals saw many rise from relative obscurity to master western education as they rallied to Azikiwe’s clarion: ‘each one train one’ in higher education or flocked to Awolowo’s free lower education.

 

If Boko Haram is today still protesting that Western education is Haram, it may not be unconnected with the fact that ‘The ‘educated Negroes’ have the attitude of contempt towards their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, (the Arab, we may add), the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African’. – Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro, Washington, D.C., 1933. Rather than respond to this legitimate critique of western education in Africa with the sledge-hammer or sharpen the critique through terrorism, we need to engage the masses in a dialogue designed to transform our educational system away from irrelevancies and focus our educational energies on the urgent eradication of mass illiteracy among our people, with emphasis on functional literacy and with the cultivation of creative and critical thinking crucial for survival and prosperity in the knowledge-based economy of today.

 

It is not controversial at all to observe that western education has something that Nigerians would call a problematic K-leg: ‘Okigbo was assimilated into a western unconscious, as was every ‘privileged’ member of his generation who had the same opportunities of  an elitist English education. The allure of their intellectual pursuits led them all towards a deeper encounter with western cultural values. Through their distinctly English education, they grew apart from the rest of the community’. – Obi Nwakanma, Christopher Okigbo, 19340-1967: Thirsting for Sunlight, London, James Curry. Killing people like Okigbo is no solution to our educational crisis.

 

The Boko Haram should stop thinking that fellow Nigerians, especially the industrious Igbo who sacrifice so much to provide essential services in the remotest parts of the country, are their enemies because the snake that is problematic in the house of the rat is also problematic in the house of the lizard. The problem in Nigeria is that of mass illiteracy all over the country although it is worse, much worse, in the northern parts of the country. Let us join hands and eliminate this national shame from our land by implementing an urgent program of compulsory education for all with the masses of the unemployed graduates mobilized and re-trained as teachers and with a target of achieving 100% literacy in four years!

 

The reported assertion of Boko Haram that western education is Har(a)m-ful to Africans is echoed by no less authority than Paulo Freire whose classic book, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, has just been banned in the US state of Arizona for teaching that there are oppressors and oppressed people who must learn in different ways in order to thrive in a society structured in dominance. Alice Miller would add that the type of education that Freire rejected as the banking concept of education is also harmful to European children because pedagogy as ‘child-rearing’ has been historically an abusive practice that produced moral monsters like Hilter in Europe to the detriment of tens of millions who died fighting for or against Nazism. I have argued elsewhere that we should reject the term, pedagogy, and adopt the alternative, Afrogogy, when our focus is on the education of Africans.

 

African American students came to the conclusion in the 1960s that Eurocentric education is harmful but instead of bombing and killing their fellow citizens to make their point, they adopted the peaceful revolutionary strategy based on the ancient African philosophy of non-violence by demanding for the funding of programs in Black Studies or Africana Studies and African American Studies which have now enriched the higher education system in the US and internationally even though educational disparities still exist in the Americas.

 

We need a similar peaceful revolution in education at the basic and advanced levels to tackle the problem of the prohibition of education to our people while we strive to make the contents and methods of our education truly African and not necessarily western exclusively given that some of what we call western education, such as mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, philosophy, agriculture, medicine, to mention but a few, were African inventions that were stolen by the West a long time ago, according to Cheikh Anta Diop in Civilization or Barbarism.

 

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Dirtector of Africana Studies Program, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA Ago...@vt.edu

[kenneth harrow]

dear jamaine
i don't find anything to disagree with in your response here. i agree with your points.
 my only reflection is that the nature of an epistemological approach changes from being an outsider's view to a commonly accepted one. la vonda, the portion of your response with which i agreed was on the point of perspective or point of view. i certainly agree strongly that it is different in africa from europe (meaning the "global north").
but jamaine, how long is it before an education system has become reterritorialized, become "native"? that's the same point i am making about the bible; it has been 100% reterritorialized everywhere. the central church institutions try to resist that and impose uniformity; then along comes the protestant reformation, the 30 years war, the sects that break off....
should i mention the mourid version of islam, the tijiani, the wahabi, you name it? shall i name ultra-orthodox versus reform jews? or reconstructionist jews who say, the past has a vote, that's it. we make of it now what we want.
and then, it becomes the practice; then the custom; then the local, the autochthonous, the native, etc.
the "nativism" to which i was referring was one that denied that the foreign could become the native, that the line remains.
so, i claim it doesn't. just like language itself.
so, a last example. i live in michigan; originally was from new york. when i return home to visit my sister, i notice differences in pronunciation i couldn't hear unless i had her to make audible the difference. i can't hear my own accent, but it has changed.
and i dare say, she probably doesn't even recognize how her own accent has changed over time, despite living close to the city all these years.
i've had this argument before: i don't believe the oral recitation of sunjiata today is the same as it was in the past, despite all the claims that techniques were established to sustain it. i would make the same argument re any text, oral  or written. (wanna start with shakespeare? which version are we talking about)
ken

[Abidogun, Jamaine]

Hi Ken,

 

I get what you are saying about internalizing and making what was once foreign or/and imposed as your own as it is integrated into the larger whole.  In a free cultural exchange or in the event of prior invasion and later full liberation, I would agree that is the case in the countries I study.  The only reason formal education in the Anglophone and most other African contexts continues to varying degrees as foreign is that it remains heavily dependent on outside influence, controls, standards, etc.  that have little of nothing to do with what may have organically through cultural exchange have occurred.  In the neo-colonial era one leader after another has brought in British and American “experts” to direct education efforts. Ghana’s Achimota College is an early one where the Ford Foundation and others became directly involved in curriculum and content development.  Ironically, one of the goals was to “Africanize” the curriculum.  But, here is the rub, due to the 2^nd generation of western education elite, our dear Kwame Nkrumah included – who did study under British and American institutions, the “Africanization” was comparatively superficial.  While he and other leaders were sincere in their advocacy of an Afrocentric education; they, due to what Fanon calls the colonized mind and DuBois calls double consciousness, could not or would not commit to the necessary fieldwork and partnerships to gather indigenous knowledge and methods, even though intellectually they understood and recognized its value.  This was a common occurrence across Anglophone African education history.  Of course the extreme case is Apartheid South Africa where the idea of any Black African indigenous knowledge was officially denied.  Due to the ongoing dependency on American and Britain and now, increasingly UNESCO and the World Bank, Anglophone African education maintains a Neo-colonial tint to it, that few want to address.  After all how will one compete in a global economy where America and China are the main competition, if you don’t know their knowledge? To me it is a recurring cycle of foreign imposition by governments, NGO’s, etc.

 

I wish it were as linear a process as you describe, but the historical reality says otherwise.

 

Sincerely,

[kenneth harrow]

hi jamaine
no, i don't think of it as a linear process. i see your points, but wish we could be more specific.
you need to really address specific disciplines and specific pressures to make it work.
parenthetically, again i am mostly in agreement with what you are stating, except that "africanizing" has to be problematized, just as i am doing for "western," in order to make it meaningful.
so here is the corner i know bit about:
how many african universities have departments of african literature in which a degree is given? for a while, there were virtually none. after huge complicated struggles, one emerged in yaounde, thanks to bernard fonlon's complicated political status, and the complicated anglo-franco politics in cameroon.
but other larger, more well established universities, had none, and when i inquired why in cheikh anta diop that was the case, i was told it was because the teaching of african lit occurred within the english and french departments.
there was little concern that the very existence of those departments reflected an original colonial discursive notion of knowledge, which became so broadly adopted that it became, and still remains, almost impossible to teach a thing called "cameroonian literature" because it not only is comprised for more than 200 oral traditions in cameroonian languages, but also, and especially, because the written literatures are in german, english and french, following--naturally--the colonial conquests.
even today, here in michigan state university, the same situation obtains--the old colonial divisions based on national language divisions work to separate africanist scholars.
i struggle all the time to impress on my students the need to learn french if they want to pretend to a real knowledge of african literature. i encourage them to work on african languages; and don't even try for portuguese.
but if you think about this, we are past the point where some kind of simple repudiation of a eurocentric education would make any sense in changing the situation. we are a century too late for that. instead, we have to work the process within notions of globalization and world literatures, reconfiguring what we have received in ways that hopefully enable us to sustain our work in african literature--at a time when globalization and world literature framings have decimated area studies, and rendered us 2 generations out of date.
the old arguments of africanization here don't fit the current situation.
as for the imbalances in power over what determines the education model, agreed, a thousand times. but we can't do it in a vacuum; we have to work with the powers that shape disciplines, not in our corner, but broadly in the profession. it is small tedious work, as even the african studies association pays scant attention to any african literature of any sort, and the mla, well, that is a joke. something like 3-4 panels out of 600-700.
we have always had to struggle to exist, which is why the african literature association broke free from the asa.
so, in the face of disciplinary history, to ask, let's get away from the eurocentric domination, snap our fingers, and magically create a model independent of these unequal forces that shape our discipline, that makes little sense to me.
the easy formula of ending eurocentrism isn't our solution. unless we want to use it "strategically," and i want more than that.
perhaps you can locate sites where "indigenous" knowledges exist, in some pristine fashion. i don't know. i teach african literature and cinema, and regard these disciplines are long since enmeshed in the crossings of culture, in all directions, that have shaped their fields.
ken

[Olayinka Agbetuyi]

Regarding the original premise of the current debate, I think we have to be careful not to commit what logicians call fallacy of hasty generalization.  that is not generalizaing the sins of one sect of a religion on the whole religion.
 
We should also be wary of comments that state that Western education is more capable of critical analysis than others.  Most cultures have this capacity in built in them.  Na'Allah's Ela Loro presents the Yoruba version of this phenomenon. 

Also, to refer to Augustine as imbibing the culture of Europe is anachronistic since the approximation of "Europe" in his own time was mediterranean culture.  The invention of Europe did not occur until 14 centuries after him.
 
The Jew and Gentiles knew they were always different, but Christianity was proclaimed for all by St. Paul after his conversion so this change is historically dated.
 
Religion by its nature is anachronistic but some adherents choose to reinterprete doctrines to suit contemporary demands to shore up their power base ehile others see this reinterpretation as a threat to their power base, hence the admonition to read the Quoran in the original Arabic.  What  is more the supporters of this view deliberately note the cultural imperialism involved.  Both fundamentslistic and reformers are present in most religions although the extent of permitted reform also vary with the reformers.

Olayinka Agbetuyi



 

---

Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2012 11:30:15 -0500
From: har...@msu.edu

To: usaafric...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - WHAT IS WESTERN EDUCATION?

I have to say I have watched this e-mail string with much interest. This topic is actually the main focus of my research - cultural and educational transformation due to historically imposed western education institutions in Anglophone Africa.  There are a couple of things I find interesting here. First is Toyin's use of Western education's curriculum and philosophical theories to frame his perspectives as it goes a long way to demonstrating the second item - Ken's perception that at some point, what was once western is now universal.  La Vonda's example below gets to the heart of a complex and ever-changing situation and one that continues to be in sore need of redress.  Western education as historically imposed and, now arguably, neo-colonially imposed systems continue to marginalize and even lose Indigenous knowledge.  It is an ongoing process that ebbs and flows.  At times specific events bring it to our attention, for example I wrote a chapter on Traditional medicine and education using events in Nsukka, Nigeria. In this case an internationally funded biochemical lab was working with a local bio-chemist to identify the active ingredients in local medicines in order to standardize dosage (which has a funny background story in itself).  Interestingly, the bio-chemist described the dilemma as he explained that he studied under his father, who was an herbalist in Igbo society.  As a child this biochemist, as so many others during and after colonialism, attended Christian dominated schools. It doesn't matter, as most of us know, if you go to a government run or private school,  the Western Judeo Christian or Islamic doctrine (depending on majority population) is a formal part of Anglophone African school curriculums as well as an informal part that frames almost everything else in the school.  Long story short - this man was told to give up Traditional religion, which he did, but also that the medicine that his father knew was of no consequence and because its practice was often tied with spiritual practice should be left to die with his father.  To this man's credit, he did not reject or abandon the knowledge of his father or his people.  After years in western education systems as opposed to Igbo indigenous education system (which is not a "closed" society but has pedagogical connections across West African societies), this man made a decision to work with the herbalists in his area and promote the medicine by  working with them to find ways to maintain their knowledge base and also their standing in a world that increasingly credits Western medicine over other indigenous medicine.  Of course the story is complicated by the role of the biochemical lab, which in all probability is in search for a way to make money off of indigenous medicine.  In the meantime this biochemist continues to work hand in hand with local herbalist so that indigenous knowledge is preserved.  It is after all (this is the important point) endangered knowledge.

 

Endangered by neo-colonial systems of education that literally separate children from indigenous education systems and that continue the "Christianization" and "Islamization" of Africa and therefore reduce Traditional Indigenous knowledge to a  marginalized area on the brink of extinction.  There is a real transforming (political, social, cultural, psychological) aspect that is very dangerous if left unchallenged that historically and currently maintains a western biased hierarchy in African leadership of a western educated elite and an indigenous "semi-educated" mass.   Three books come to mind as I write this, Ngugi's Decolonizing the Mind and Moving the Center and bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress.  Of course there are scores of writers on critical pedagogy (which deconstructs the political and social role of western formal education) and indigenous knowledge (which seeks to identify and retain indigenous education systems and knowledge). Henry Giroux and Paulo Freire are probably best known in critical and related liberation education theory respectively.  George Sefa Dei, Cati Coe, and Njoki Nathani Wane are a few African education writers on indigenous knowledge.  As I am currently working on a monograph on Anglophone African gender identity change and  formal education's role in it; this e-mail string highlights how we are all conditioned to varying degrees by the education that allowed us to write these words.  In the end the point is NOT to stop sharing knowledge or get rid of formal education, but to become aware that there is a lot more to share than what was inherited through western curriculums and eastern curriculums and second there are a lot more ways to learn than just by the book.  Or as my biochemist friend said based on his westernization education, "no need to throw the baby out with the bath water."  Some African governments have officially recognized this specific area of indigenous knowledge (medical), like Ghana who has set up a center dedicated to identifying and categorizing indigenous medicines.  Your discussion is very interesting as it helps us look inward and outward regarding what, as academics, we hold most dear - our education.

Another seeming exception is the transmission of ancient Greek thought to Europe in the Middle Ages by the Arab scholars. Western scholars assimilated the Arabic contribution but these  Arab scholars did not subsequently play a significant role in Western philosophy. An exception to this blanking out could be Ibn SīŋŊnīŋŊ,, better known as Avicenna, whose pioneering work in medicine seems to have been subsumed into Western medicine.

 

          Mathematics

 

Other seeming exceptions are in mathematics, where insights from various civilisations have been interpreted   by Western science and their sources acknowledged. That acknowledgement, however,  seems to still privilege Western and particularly European scholars  as the foundation of what is known as mathematics in the modern sense. I don't know enough about mathematics to know if this view can be challenged. . There are non-Western mathematicians  in the more recent mathematical canon, like Ramanujan, but they seem few to me.

 

I am not  informed enough on the sciences to give a thumbnail survey on them in relation to those issues but I suspect that the same point might hold there.

 

Selectivity in the Development of Western Education

 

Western valorisng of Western civilisation  through the character of its educational system has been central to the creation of  a body of knowledge and of strategies for disseminating  knowledge that can be correctly  described as Western education. This process of valorising one's own civilisation by excluding  ideas and achievements from other civilisations  in the process of building one's own educational system emerged for a number of reasons.

 

These reasons could be described as including  lack of access to information about other civilisations,  difficulties of understanding those civilisations and relating them to the social and individual experiences of Europeans, whose history is at the centre of Western education, as well as efforts to valorise Western civilisation at the expense of other civilisations, along with what seems to be a process of selection from the achievements of seminal figures of Western thought, who could be described as encapsulating a multi-faceted scope of achievement that their descendants  were not able to integrate in its  entirety  but could assimilate only piecemeal into Western education as it developed over the centuries.

 The selections eventually arrived at  from the  works of these  seminal figures and emphasised in the educational system  can be described as arrived at through various processes, one being through the outcome of battles for legitimacy between  various cognitive paradigms, paradigms defined in terms of particular metaphysical and epistemic perspectives and their related cognitive histories.

 

Emerging Changes

 

Changes might be emerging to these paradigms, as represented, for example, by the presence of Asian thought in various disciplines, as in philosophy of mind and neuroscience.

 

Examples of these are Self, No Self? : Perspectives from Analytical, Phenomenological  and Indian Traditions, published by Oxford UP( 2010) , The Measure of Things: by David Cooper, which draws on Buddhist and European secular philosophers,  again published by Oxford UP (2002) and  Ornella Corazza's essays and her book Near-Death Experiences: Exploring the Mind-Body Connection published by Routledge (2008)  which draw significantly   on Japanese philosophy. Corazza describes her research as to developing " new strategies to enhance our lifestyle by bridging science and Oriental traditions."

 

For these initiatives to be described as significantly   affecting Western thought would require not only discussion of them in isolation from European roots of the Western tradition, which might have been the position before the last 50 years or more, to the recent correlative discussion represented  by the two Oxford UP books, to rethinking  the foundational ideas of inherent in this educational system, as Corazza seems to be doing, all the way to creating curricula that reflect such re-evaluations  in terms of  how people are thought to search for and validate knowledge.

 

An educational system based on  different metaphysical and epistemic conceptions, drawing from a different style of privileging cognitive history, could approach the entire body of global knowledge differently. 

 

        The Potential of India

 

Such systems might emerge in India, for example, which is engaged in vigorous publishing of all kinds of books, and republishes under licence books on India published  in the West and sells and exports these books at cheaper  prices  than the Western originals - the West in this instance being  European and North American, particularly US publishing companies.

[Pius Adesanmi]

http://saharareporters.com/column/occupy-nigeria-ngozi-okonjo-iweala-paul-collier-and-some-troublesome-nigerian-professors

Occupy Nigeria: Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, Paul Collier,
and Some Troublesome Nigerian Professors!

By Pius Adesanmi

Somehow,
in the heat of Occupy Nigeria last week, somebody must have convinced Finance
Minister and Coordinating Minister of the Economy (a clever way of calling her
Prime Minister and maintaining deniability), Dr Ngozi Okonjo Iweala, to embark
on a well-oiled, behind-the-scene, reach-out campaign to carefully selected
Nigerian Professors at home and abroad. Mission: persuade them to become
paracletes of the IMF philosophy that she and her fellow hijackers of the
Jonathan regime – Sanusi Lamido Sanusi and Diezani Allison Madueke – have
foisted on Nigerians in the form of oil subsidy removal. Modus operandi: add
the selected Professors to her linked-in profile, send them materials favorable
to her case, and appeal to them to spread the word.

And
some of them did begin to spread the word. I knew something was amiss when the
same message from Mrs Iweala began to trickle into my gmail account from
listservs and, in certain instances, directly from colleagues, with the rider
that they’d been asked to share the minister’s message. I decided to ignore all
the pro-government trickle until a message came from Professor Mojubaolu Okome
asking colleagues in a diaspora and transnational scholarship listserv she
moderates to critique Mrs. Iweala’s message to her. Confession: the appearance
of a senior colleague I fondly call “aunty mi” in the flow of discourse between
the Mrs Iweala and her target Nigerian professors foreclosed the possibility of
further indifference to the Minister’s curious strategy for me. A respected
Professor of Political Science, African Studies, and Women’s Studies at
Brooklyn College, City University of New York, aunty Mojubaolu’s scholarship
and praxis come from the best traditions of commitment and social
responsibility. This is one scholar you are not going to ask to just “pass on
the word”!

Once
I saw her name, I surmised that Mrs. Iweala and her team had made a tactical
blunder by contacting this Professor in the hope that she would just be a
simple vector of their message. I knew they were in for serious intellectual
grilling and critique. I was right. Professor Okome took on the Minister. They
exchanged civil but robust emails. I read from the ringside, admiring how
beautifully Professor Okome was making the case of the Nigerian people, backed
by her characteristic intellectual rigor. Every time I felt like jumping in, I
would conclude that there was no way I could state our case as beautifully as
aunty Mojubaolu was doing.

Then
came the spoiler! I woke up on Wednesday to a new round of exchanges between
aunty Mojubaolu and the Minister. Perhaps frustrated that she was not making
any headway in selling her argument, Mrs Iweala wrote another civil email but
ruined it for me by referring Professor Okome to the offensive and now infamous
pro-government subsidy article published by the meddlesome Paul Collier!
Reading Mrs Okonjo Iweala’s email, I nearly smashed my computer screen in
anger! Here is a Nigerian female Minister discussing Nigerian matters of life and
death with a Nigerian female Professor and who, unable to provide superior
arguments to back up her pro-subsidy removal position, sends the Nigerian
Professor to a rude and condescending British Professor for validation! Why
would Mrs Okonjo Iweala believe that Professor Paul Collier is better
positioned to advise her about Nigeria and Nigerians than Professor Mojubaolu
Okome? Why should she have given that Englishman a say in an otherwise engaging
and mutually respectful exchange between two Nigerian female intellectuals? Unable
to contain my frustration, I jumped into the conversation with this email to Dr
Okonjo Iweala:

Dear Mrs Ngozi Okonjo Iweala:
 
Greetings and thanks for taking the time to read
and react to my comments. I will be brief, mindful of your commitments at this
particularly difficult moment in the life of our country. I've been following
your interesting email exchanges with my sister and senior colleague, Professor
Mojubaolu Okome, and have been more persuaded by her submissions than yours. You
asked her to share your views in her intellectual circuit and she's been kind
enough to oblige. I wasn't going to intervene because Aunty Okome has been
saying all the things I would have loved to say to you but I woke up this
morning to another round of exchanges and your submissions did not help my
mood. Honourable Minister, to make your case, to press the argument of your
government, you refer a respected Nigerian Professor like Mojubaolu Okome to
Paul Collier's article. Ma, this is an article in which this British meddler
insults the Nigerian people. As far as he is concerned, we are foolish and
ignorant tea-partyers. Our legitimate and historic movement, Occupy Nigeria, he
dismisses in terms that are too painful to be rehashed here. Your wholesale endorsement
of Paul Collier's condescending article raises a lot of questions. Mindful of
your time, I'll ask just two:
 
1) Are you aware, Honorable Minister, of the
outrage that the article in question has generated, especially in Nigeria's
online community? Are you aware of how Nigerians are reacting to yet another
spectacular instance of rudeness and condescension by a Western meddler in our
affairs? And if you are not aware of how Nigerians are reacting to the
offensive article, isn't that another evidence that Nigerian government
officials are alienated from the Nigerian people?
 
2) Why does the government of Nigeria find it so
easy to approve of these kinds of foreign interventions in our affairs, often
even soliciting and funding such interventions, no matter how condescending,
while dismissing the position of patriotic Nigerians? For instance, your
government has embraced Jeffrey Sachs and Paul Collier. But this is the same
government that dismissed Professor Chinua Achebe as ignorant and out of touch
with Nigerian realities (Reuben Abati) when he commented on burning national
issues in a statement rejecting the national honour he was awarded. If we are
to take your government's position to its logical conclusion, Jeffrey Sachs and
Paul Collier are more knowledgeable, more competent to talk about Nigeria than
Chinua Achebe? They are more in touch with Nigerian realities than Chinua
Achebe?

I assume that you have no objection to my sharing these queries and your
eventual response with my readers in the spirit of national conversation.

Best Regards,

Pius Adesanmi
 
I
didn’t expect a response. It was more of a symbolic intervention on my part.
Unknown to me, my intellectual co-warrior and long-term travel mate in the
world of ideas, Professor Wale Adebanwi of the University of California at
Davis, was also in on the conversation and had been equally irked by the
Minister’s reference to and validation of Paul Collier’s offensive article.
Like me, Wale is also one of Professor Mojubaolu’s troublesome “aburos”. Wale
fired this email to the Minister:
 
Dear Dr.
Okonjo-Iweala,
 
Greetings.
 
First, let me quickly commend your civility in the
middle of very difficult circumstances.
 
I was not going to respond to your invitation for
intervention because speaking to those in power in Nigeria, except in the
"languages" of interrupting their pleasure, is often a waste of time.
 
However, given Prof. Okome's intervention and my
friend's (Pius's) excellent questions, I am compelled to add a thing or
two. 
 
We all have no doubt about either your competence
or commitment, we clearly have problems with your paradigm and the competence
and commitment of your political bosses.
 
Three brief questions given the limitations of this
forum: 
 
1. What other nation of the world would have such
abundance of human and natural resources and regularly recruit the least
competent into the topmost level of political leadership? This is a structural
and historical question that escapes Sachs and Collier, as displayed in the condescension
evident in their responses. The matter is beyond mere economic theories. 
 
2. Haven't we been here before? On that note,
neither you nor President Jonathan can be wiser than Nigerians. As Achebe says,
no matter how wise a (wo)man is s/he cannot be wiser that her/his clan; 'no one
wins judgement against his people'. If Nigerians have lived with these
arguments in the past and have witnessed the continued and steady deterioration
of their quality of life, what makes this different - especially coming from a
president who is challenged on many fronts?
 
3. Please, provide a single social or political -
even fiscal - evidence before the January 1 action that showed that this
government truly understands the pain of Nigerians? Was it the scandalous self-provisioning
for the Villa denizens that litter the 2012 budget or the sheer indulgence that
is the life of federal legislators that would have convinced our people about a
committed leadership? What is 25% pay cut for a pampered cult whose pay no one
truly knows?
 
I am saying basically that you cannot throw
neo-liberal solutions at fundamental structural - political and historical -
questions that condition the tragedies that we have, and are, experiencing in
Nigeria. 
 
I have no doubt that as you found out under
President Obasanjo, when they are done with using your credentials, they will
move on to the next in their perpetual project of national humiliation.
 
You can start the change by telling the president
the alternative to a genuine national dialogue on restructuring Nigeria is the
collapse of the House. 
 
I wish you well.
 
Wale Adebanwi,
UC Davis, CA.
 
Like me, Wale got no response. It was evident that
our reactions, which came within minutes of each other, were going to drive the
Minister away from that small forum. The important thing is that we made our
point. Professor Mojubaolu Okome did us proud with her robust engagement of the
Minister and I believe that Wale and I also made a good case for respect and
dignity. I have decided to go public with this to send a clear message to those
with Mrs Iweala’s inclination in the Nigerian government: you are welcome to
believe that American and British experts and consultants are superior to
Nigerian intellectuals; you are welcome to believe that they are more in touch with
Nigeria than Chinua Achebe; you are welcome to fly them first class on the back
of the Nigerian people to come and advise you in Abuja but, please, do not add
insult to injury by referring us to their expertise!
 
N.B: Professor Okome collated more
responses to the minister at her blog. Please see:
http://mojubaolu.blogspot.com/2012/01/nigeria-and-petrol-subsidy-wahala_5976.html

________________________________                      

[Abidogun, Jamaine]

Hi Ken,

 

I think we are saying many of the same things just from different perspectives and with different emphasis.  I am not denying the reality of ongoing cultural exchange, but am saying that more effort needs to go into documenting what is left to the margins or maybe is there, but not clarified.  Your examples of Africanized education in higher ed as you point out are typical across much of Africa.  The K-12 systems do not fare as well (which is my area of fieldwork).  Having attended the University of Ibadan and taught at the University of Nigeria, I understand what you’re talking about in a very lived way.  Also having conducted fieldwork in K-12 schools in Ghana, Nigeria, and Jamaica these literatures and languages and “African” ways of knowing are included to the same extent – in fact some are often omitted or taught in a marginalized fashion that communicates a status of lesser value.  For example in a school that I worked with in Ghana, Twi and Ga were both languages in the curriculum, but the two teachers had minimal credentials and had to teach in the same classroom at the same time using pamphlets that the students did not have copies of.  In the same school, the English language was taught and the teacher had a full teaching certificate and was provided a classroom set of textbooks and of course a classroom to herself.  This is the kind of experience I see and have reported to me by students and teachers in Ghana and Nigeria.  It is not new and goes to the learning of what constitutes cultural capital (which Bourdieu, Giroux, and Freire explain in great detail).  When teaching at the University of Nigeria, students in the History Dept did tell me that they had not take a real course in African or Nigerian history until arriving at university.  I have written chapters and articles on this topic.  There are very concrete curricular reasons for these realities that I present above.  Most people do not attend university and those that do are shaped largely from what they were exposed to before they arrived there.  Anyway, I don’t see it as a black and white issue – it isn’t a rejection of “western” knowledge or a demand to create clear cut categories or courses of “African” or “Western”  - that is an overly simplistic and insulting proposition to make.  I am sorry if you think that is what I am saying. 

 

It is an exploration of history and culture to see what is in the whole and not just what is in the present textbook.  After all teachers can only teach what they know.  Finally to your issue of a “location” of indigenous knowledge – they are everywhere in Africa.  The villages in particular, where less than the majority are involved in formal education.  The indigenous education systems continue, yes with changes based on historical exchanges and normal societal developments, but these systems continue to exist nonetheless.  When I interview students in the formal schools, they often say that they “do not learn what the children of the community learn” so they are not as aware of the complexities of certain social, religious, or political processes and communications and therefore not as adept at negotiating within their home communities.  While you may not find this of value, it is part and parcel of their societies and is very real. Again I refer you to those who specialize in these “locations” as I listed in my first response George Sefa Dei, Cati Coe, and Njoki Nathani Wane, to name a few.  Another helpful text to understand the presence of the two education systems and the push pull between them is Toyin Falola’s A Mouth Sweeter than Salt.  As you read it, you get a very real sense of the role of indigenous education alongside the growing impact of “western” formal education.  He presents the complexity of learning from both these systems through lived experiences as he navigates between semi-separation from a full indigenous education system due to full participation in school.  

As we both struggle through negotiating culture and knowledge – it is not a win-lose proposition – it is a coming together win-win objective.  Okay I have to end here.  I have really enjoyed this discussion – it gives me food for thought on the rigors of presentation and the variance of perspectives – but takes me away from the actual writing of the specifics and details (as you pointed out and I agree the details matter) which will be in my monograph J 

 

Take care,

[kenneth harrow]

hi jamaine
wonderful explanation. really enjoyed this.
i was carping at the reductive use of "western"--but your full examples and explanations here are really quite wonderful. and convincing!
thanks!
ken