like free speech and enshrined democratic rights, arguably the very thing that underpins the newer scholarship concerning other cultures and experiences. And some claim this has led to nothing more than “presentism,” wherein everything in the past must now be
viewed by the standards of the present.9 Their response to change thus ranges from a shrug of the shoulder recognizing valid claims to questioning whether this is all but a fad, to seeing it as a political and not scholarly enterprise, to a challenge of their worldview and quite possibly a threat to their continued employment at the institution.
And it needs to be understood criticism does not limit itself to the liberal arts. Mathematics has now also come under attack, with requests mathematic curriculums be "decolonised."
For example, British universities are now being asked by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (QAA) — an independent charity that reviews university courses – to teach a “decolonize view” of mathematics. Though the agency did not explain what they meant by decolonizing, but it did give an example of how it might be done:
Students should be made aware of problematic issues in the development of the (maths) content they are being taught, for example some pioneers of statistics supported eugenics, or some mathematicians had connections to the slave trade, racism, or Nazism.
The interesting thing to note here is that, according to John Armstrong, “the QAA’s benchmark document that defines the common mathematics curriculum has grown in length by 50 percent in just three years, but not because
of any radical shift in the nature of the
mathematics. Instead, there has been a been a decision to introduce teaching on diversity, sustainable education and entrepreneurship into every university course.”10
This is quite an interesting perspective, which seems to be upheld through a simple review of history. Agreement exists that the earliest tally or known demonstration of sequences of prime numbers (or a six-month lunar calendar) can be traced to a 20,000 year-old Ishango bone found near the headwaters of the Nile in what is now northeastern Congo. The earliest evidence of written mathematics can be traced to ancient Sumerians. An Egyptian mathematical text, known as the Rhind papyrus, is a likely copy of an older document dating to 2000-1800 BC. The Chinese mathematical text, known as the Zhoubi Suanjing, has been dated to 1200-100 BC; and counting rod numbers 1-9, also find their origins in China. Each precedes and demonstrates multicultural origins underpinning mathematics that precede what is the earliest known origins of Greek mathematics, which is thought to begin with Thales of Miletus (c. 624–c.546 BC) and Pythagoras of Samos (c. 582–c. 507 BC), which were probably themselves inspired by Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics..11 Such facts are well known and presented in
It seems only natural that the theoretical debate over the legitimacy of individualism first find practical expression in education – particularly, higher education. It is in higher education that professors engage in scholarship, publishing, and debate – and then turn to use their findings to educate students.
16