ABSTRACT
The purpose of studying non-western educational traditions is both to help us understand the common principles that underlie all educational undertakings and to understand the different means that human beings have devised to accomplish these principles. The study of non-western educational traditions is in some ways similar to the study of the diverse languages used by human beings around the world. One of the interesting aspects of studying non-western cultures is the variety of ways in which the impressive accomplishments of non-western cultures and societies have often been rejected altogether, diminished in importance, or attributed to other civilizations and sources. Cultural ethnocentrism refers to manifestations of ethnocentrism in individual scholars and their work, as well as to the socio-cultural context that has helped to form and support such individual and idiosyncratic biases. The word 'culture' is perhaps the prime case of a 'week-off word'.
