World Religions Conference November 1957

Author(s): Sushil Muni
Publisher: Achal Singh Seth

Page 11

Background
Need For Improvement
The modern education instead of widening our outlook, has on the other hand, made us narrow-minded, bigoted and prejudiced. Science, also, instead of serving the needs of mankind, has become a hand-maid to party politics and as such, the means of wholesale slaughter and destruction. Similirly, culture too has failed to be a cementing factor and has gradually come to be recognised as something different in different countries. In spite of all this, it has to its credit, never lost sight of the original purity and Integrity and it has always been trying to come to its own. As an instance in point, history occupies an important place in our educational system, but it is now concerned only with an account of battles and wars between man and man, nation and nation and country and country. These accounts of bitter struggles that abound in the pages of our history books, tend to perpetuate and keep afresh the ancient wound and scars. It is because of this that the UNESO is now engaged in the task of recasting history from a different angle.
This need, for purifying history, was felt when it came to light that the text books in shools and colleges, Instead of giving a broad outlook to young students at an impressionable age, as members of the one great family of Man, became the means of filling their minds with class hatreds and racial animosities. In 1948, a book was published in this connection. In 1950, an international committee was constituted to reshape history and text books. For this work various sub-committees were set-up and they worked over it with a loving zeal. The sub-committees of two or three countries did very useful work in this connection. They studied the historical literature very critically with a view to weeding out all such matters that were likely to create feelings of ill-will and misgivings and were considered slanderous in nature.
The historians in France, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Norway went deeply into this problem and decided to give a correct lead in this direction. in 1946, the Educational Committee under the United States also carried on its investigation and it was found that their books on Asiatic culture, civilization and living standards were misleading and incorrect, in as much as, these were based on ideas arising from industrially minded people, with the result that the West had begun to look down upon the East and gradually the Westerners had come to believe that they were in every way superior to and far advanced than the people in the East. To remedy these evils, the UNESCO is engagd in re-writing the history of mankind. In nut-shell, if we have to live as members of the One Great Family of Man, on one common platform of education, science and culture, we shall have to find out their real and intrinsic values and prepare a healthy ground, and this is not possible, until we completely transform our history and other text books,