Our education needs decolonising

OUR present education system is very Eurocentric and onesided, and gives our students subjective information.

Former president Thabo Mbeki told us a few years ago he was going to decolonise our education system. Yet no initiative was taken.

Our students are still learning facts and figures that were manipulated by colonial rulers and by the past apartheid government where the false idea, that whites were superior in intellect to others, was promoted.

The dominance of interest in the objective sciences means that Indians were pioneers in its development. The German philosopher Heine wrote: “There is a great affinity in me with the Hindu genius.” Famous British writer Aldous Huxley invites our attention to the discipline essential for spiritual insight and argues for acceptance of the Yoga method.

The influence of Indian thought is not so much a model to be copied, as a dye which permeates.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell (Cambridge University), who won the Nobel Prize for Philosophy in 1950, writes: “About 830 AD, Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarazami, a translator of mathematical and astronomical books from Sanskrit, published a book which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century, under the title ALGORITMI de NUMERO INDRUM.

“It was from this book that the West (Europeans) first learnt of what we call ‘Arabic’ numerals, which ought to be called INDIAN NUMERALS.” (History of Western Philosophy, p. 344). Even chess and astronomical knowledge have their origins in India.

Yet most of our students in schools, colleges and universities in our country are confronted daily with falsified versions of history and scientific knowledge.

Ask any student in South Africa who discovered the numeral system that billions of people use daily. No-one would say Indians.

Before Indians were colonised, they were able to hold their own in mathematics, geometry, medicine, surgery art, crafts and industry.

Education in our present system transfers not only false knowledge but also values and appreciations. Ancient Indians do not belong to a different species than ourselves.

We find, from an actual study of their views, that they ask questions and find answers, and analogous in their diversity to some of the more important currents in modern thought. The history of Indian thought illustrates the endless quest of the mind, ever old, ever new. DR SEARS APPALSAMY

Netherlands