A secular network of Soka schools around the world, including several independent secondary schools, and two universities (Sōka University of Japan and Soka University of America) were established by Daisaku Ikeda based on Makiguchi's pedagogy."The fairly recent growth in the internationalization of Soka education," writes Paul Sherman, specialist in global citizenship education in higher education, "is a reflection of Makiguchi's ideas on the important function of education in human development, in that he believed a key purpose of education was to cultivate global-minded individuals who could be empathetically engaged with the world, while at the same time maintain their roots at the local community level."