The decolonization of higher education in the West continues unabated, writes British sociologist Frank Furedi on his blog Substack. The latest development in decolonization in Britain is that the country’s higher education watchdog, the Quality Assurance Agency (QAA), is demanding that the maths curriculum be decolonized and become a tool for promoting social, economic and ethnic diversity. The purpose of this curriculum change is that students feel (white) guilt and shame about the mathematical subject and its history.
Furedi thinks there is something fundamentally grotesque about the way the QAA seeks to link math to crime, such as when the QAA guidelines ask teachers to be aware that certain theories on the subject of statistics are at their era had authors who supported eugenics (racial hygiene). The QAA also believes that some astronomical data was collected by plantation slaves, and that professors and teachers at universities and colleges should be aware that some of the mathematicians of the past held racist and fascist attitudes, or had Nazi connections.
The QAA’s attempt to make math a subject steeped in racism is arguably inspired by the decolonization movement in North America, where the subject is described as very “white” and very oppressive. Fortunately, QAA doesn’t go as far as last fall at Simon Fraser University in Canada, where it was decided to expose “oppressive structures” and “(white) biases” in math and science.
Taliban opinion management
Furedi believes that the QAA paves the way for a development where the decolonization of science quickly becomes the norm in British institutions. Even subjects such as geology, archeology, and the classical humanities are under pressure to decolonize and, so to speak, apologize for their existence. Subjects such as economics, engineering studies, business and administration, life sciences, languages, law and political science already fall under the educational authority of the QAA.
Furedi compares what is happening in British education to the Cultural Revolution in China and the management and control of Taliban opinion in Afghanistan. The QAA and parts of the higher education establishment want to undermine Britain’s cultural and intellectual heritage. Decolonization is another word for detaching British society from its intellectual and cultural history, Furedi believes. In a leaked copy of a draft engineering curriculum at the University of Sheffield, it is pointed out that Isaac Newton may have benefited from economic activity during British colonial times.
It is evident that higher education is at risk when an engineering faculty steps in to decolonize the curriculum to counter old and entrenched, unconscious and conscious attitudes and Eurocentric and white approaches to science and math among students, to promote an inclusive curriculum. In reality, this plan is an attempt to decolonize the engineering curriculum in order to destroy the reputation of one of the most important founders of modern science, Isaac Newton, one of the greatest scientists and mathematicians of all time and the most important figure in the history of scientific revolution in Europe.
Will remove Newton
According to a proponent of decolonization, science was a practical and ideological instrument in the establishment of the British Empire. Western science was closely linked to colonialism and especially to British imperialism. This lawyer is absolutely right that science and technology was a prerequisite for the creation of the British Empire. But to reject modern science and technology, which with their universal basis and method have shaped the modern world, is quite another matter: yes, it is a form of absurdity and idiocy that only awakened culture and the political correctness of our time are capable of producing.
And as Furedi writes: When they come to take Newton, it’s only a matter of time when they come to demolish Louis Pasteur, Michael Faraday and Albert Einstein. And it is also not surprising that in the draft curriculum of the University of Sheffield, it is suggested that world-renowned scientists such as Paul Dirac, Pierre-Simo Laplace and Gottfried W. Leibniz can also be considered as having benefited from (commercial) activities in connection with the British colonial power and is therefore ready for the historic scrap heap.
The decolonization project in British universities has nothing to do with academic learning. Its aim is to discredit and bring down prominent historical figures in the history of science, writes Furedi, while providing many other examples of the madness of academic decolonization ravaging the Anglo-Saxon world. For example, it has become mandatory for the classical music establishment to apologize for the art form’s alleged association with white privilege. In the New Yorker magazine, music critic Alex Ross apologized for being a “white” American. According to Ross, classical music is compromised by its history which demonstrates systematic racism.
Orwell’s prediction comes true
In literature, the cancellation and “culling” of the classics has almost become a general rule, according to Furedi. There are now joint efforts by cultural jihadists of the time to render certain works of the literary canon, such as Homer’s “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey,” invisible. “We are very proud to have been retired The Odyssey curriculum, recently wrote a teacher at a college in Massachusetts in the United States. Cancel culture stormtroopers are also working hard to define the four giants of British literature: Chaucer, Shakespeare. Milton and Byron, as white supremacists (overlords).
Furedi believes that today’s cancel culture was anticipated in George Orwell’s novel “1984”, where the main character Winston Smith is told by a colleague in the archives of the Ministry of Truth: “In 2050, perhaps sooner all knowledge of the old language (English) will disappear. All past literature will be destroyed. Books of Chaucer, Shakespeare. Milton and Byron will exist only in Nytale editions and not only will be changed into some something other than what they were, but changed into something totally opposed to what they once were”.
If the current development and growth of the awakened cultural jihad of politically correct elites against the literary and scientific heritage of the Western world continues, Orwell’s prediction will be more than realized before 2050, and the Western world will be gone, nullified and forget. There are indeed promising prospects for the totalitarian forces of the era when large sections of the peoples of the Western world willingly placed themselves under the authoritarian yoke of political correctness.
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