The detained editor of a Swaziland political magazine
South Africa’s focus on teaching academic subjects, maths and science at school level has come at a price — a lack of ethics among the nation’s adults, said Dr John Chibaya Mbuya, author, risk specialist and lecturer at the University of Limpopo.
“We are focusing on maths and science at school, and not teaching ethics. Then we are catching people as adults and asking them to become ethical. This is almost impossible. We need to be teaching children ethics from birth,” he said.
Mbuya said ethics should be taught in schools from kindergarten level through to graduate level, to raise the consciousness levels of all South Africans.
Referencing David Hawkins’s Map of Consciousness scale, which links Kinesiological tests (Kinesiology: the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement) with levels of consciousness and enlightenment, Dr Mbuya said 200 on the scale is considered the “level of truth”.
Only a rare few ascend to levels above 500, he said, and the late President Nelson Mandela had been calibrated at 380. Extensive sampling and testing using this scale had found that people in North America and the Eurozone calibrated on an average of between 190 and 420; people in China calibrated between 200 and 450 and people in Africa calibrated between 40 and 160. “We don’t know why this is. Obviously, there are exceptions to the rule, but these are the findings.”
Mbuya caused a ripple of consternation when he announced that the average calibration in South Africa’s public service also fell into the “zone of non-integrity” — between 40 and 160. “There are exceptions who might calibrate around 400, but the majority hover around 160. If 200 is the level of truth, we have to try to raise our calibration to this level,” he said.