Sometimes it feels like the world began in Europe and ended in America. At least, that’s what the classrooms made it seem like. History, science, and art were all written with Western accents. Everyone else just got subtitles. 

I remember sitting in school back home in India, learning about Newton before Aryabhata, about Columbus before Zheng He, about “civilization” as though it was a gift handed to us by white men on boats. We were taught about the world as if we only became a part of it once Europe showed up. 

I didn’t question it for the longest time. That’s what repetition does. When something is told to you enough times, it starts sounding like the truth. 

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When I came to Canada for university, I realized this wasn’t just an Indian thing. The Canadian education system, for all its talk about diversity and inclusion, still teaches the world through a Western lens. You can change the flag, but the narrative doesn’t shift. 

I have sat in classrooms that describe themselves as “global” or “cross-cultural,” yet the readings are still dominated by Euro-American thinkers. The same philosophers, the same wars, the same frameworks on what counts as “modern” or “progressive”. When professors do mention the rest of the world, it’s often in passing. A paragraph on “developing nations” or a quick reference to “non-Western contexts”. 

No mention of who discovered zero. No mention of who built the first cities, mapped the stars, or performed surgeries centuries before “modern medicine”. 

Mathematics did not start with Europe. It started with the Babylonians measuring time, the Egyptians calculating pyramids with geometric precision, and Indian scholars like Aryabhata defining the value of pi long before calculus was even imagined. Astronomy thrived in ancient China, where people recorded comets and mapped eclipses while Europe was still debating whether the Earth was flat. Medicine flourished in Egypt, India, Persia, herbal treatments, Ayurveda, and early surgical tools, long before Western science gave itself credit for the discovery. 

The world’s knowledge existed everywhere. But in our textbooks, it only seems to exist where English was later spoken. 

Even in Canada, a country that prides itself on multiculturalism, the education system still centres on Europe as the main character. There’s an entire history buried beneath the land we live on, belonging to Indigenous nations who had governance, trade, astronomy, and medicine long before colonization. Yet most Canadians can name every European explorer but not the people whose lands those explorers took. 

We talk about reconciliation but rarely about responsibility. We teach about “Canada’s discovery”, but not about the destruction that followed. We talk about “multicultural classrooms”, but the culture that dominates the syllabus is still white. 

And then came America, the place that turned history into marketing. Freedom, democracy, and innovation all packaged and sold with a smile. Every war became a mission, every invasion became liberation, every theft became trade. America learned how to brand its power so well that even those it exploited began to admire it. 

That’s the part that hurts the most. Growing up brown means learning to admire the very systems that erased you. You are taught that progress looks Western, that intelligence sounds English, and that beauty means white. It changes how you move, how you speak, how you think of yourself. You spend years trying to sound “articulate”, trying to be “global”, trying to be “educated”. But what those words really mean, most of the time, is “less like yourself”. 

And even after crossing oceans to study in a country that claims to value diversity, the lesson continues. You sit in classrooms that talk about representation but still quote the same thinkers who built empires. You listen to lectures about globalization that never mention colonization. You attend events celebrating inclusion where the speakers all look the same. 

It’s subtle, but it’s everywhere. The idea that the West invented civilization still lingers like background noise. It’s in the way academic citations prioritize European scholars, the way global issues are taught from the perspective of Western intervention, and the way “international” students are expected to fit into a mould rather than expand it. 

Sometimes it feels like diversity in Canadian education means everyone gets to be included, as long as they agree that Europe came first. 

But that’s not how the world began. The world began everywhere at once. In the Nile Valley, in the Indus River, in the temples of Angkor, in the rainforests of the Amazon, in the plains of Africa, and in the stars mapped by the Mayans. Civilization was never a single line moving westward. It was a thousand voices speaking at once. 

That is what our education forgets, and why it matters so much to remember. Because education is not neutral. It does not just teach facts. It teaches hierarchy. It decides whose stories are remembered and whose are reduced to footnotes. And I’m tired of being a footnote. 

I don’t want to rewrite history. I just want to unwhitewash it. I want classrooms where students learn that algebra wasn’t a Western miracle, that Africa had libraries before Europe had universities, and that Indigenous peoples of Canada understood ecology and astronomy long before colonizers arrived to “discover” them. 

I want students like me, the ones who left home chasing “global education”, to find themselves in the story of the world. To see that they come from innovators, artists, philosophers, astronomers, and healers. To know that our histories are not just tragic, but brilliant. 

We’re not asking for representation. We’re asking for a correction. 

Until education starts teaching history as it actually happened, with all its blood, brilliance, and diversity, racism and colourism will keep finding new ways to survive. They grow from ignorance. They grow from the lie that the world was discovered instead of already existing. 

The world didn’t begin in Europe. It began everywhere. In the hands that built, in the minds that dreamed, and in the voices that created without needing permission. 

And what we call “Western civilization”? It’s just the Global South with better PR.