Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly, on March 27 - April 2, 2017.

 

The ruminations of Parent Action Group for Education (PAGE) chairman Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim (“The time is ripe for reconciliation”, Issue 1154, March 20), which focused on  education pressure group Inisiatif Pengislahan Pendidikan Negara (IPPN), attracted my attention. Formed in 2014 by 17 educational NGOs, it is a national education reform initiative that seeks to “inculcate the Malaysian approach to education”.

Searching for what the article would say on the objective of quality education (one of IPPN’s goals), I found it in paragraph 5: “To provide a better quality of life for all.” Paragraph 6 further added, “Equality for all”, an aspiration of Jiao Zong’s founder Lim Lian Geok .

So, after more than half a century of independence and a year into the Malaysia Education Blueprint (2015 to 2025), or MEB, we have encapsulated the objectives of education to two major goals:  quality of life and equality for all. Lim’s core values centred on the development of human values and principles, while NGO IKRAM added “Negara Rahmat” as its objective in educating young minds via compassion.

In this thicket of aspirations for Malaysian education, things appear rather fuzzy to me. While PAGE struggles to make English a primary vehicle for education, Jiao Zong is struggling to get the Unified Examination Certificate — which its Chinese constituency lives by, to be recognised. IKRAM’s “Negara Rahmat” is a lofty ideal as a blessed nation, part of our national ethos as found in the Rukunegara and Negara Ku, and now, the Islamic way of  Maqasid al Shariah.

I wish we could be clearer when it comes to education as this affects all of us,  and the disparate struggles of these NGOs to effect reform of the education blueprint, though unified through IPPN, do not seem to help.

We used to have Kementerian Pelajaran in the 1960s (Ministry of Education), but now, it is Kementerian Pendidikan (Ministry of Education or of Schooling?).  In Malay, terdidik is higher than terpelajar (schooled versus educated, as in high education).

Someone armed with a PhD is terpelajar, but not necessarily terdidik, as manifested by many degree holders who fail to live as a schooled person. Look at the number of corrupt officials hauled up almost weekly for corruption.  The Arabs have a more precise word, tarbiyyah,  which is the transformation of the heart towards goodness, and not merely of the mind in acquiring knowledge.

If one is schooled in ethics and integrity, albeit lacking in higher education, one would not succumb to base instincts. Alas, we have a nation with a high proportion of highly educated (terpelajar) but unethical (tidak terdidik) population (reference: Syed Naguid al Attas’s exposition on adab, or civilised self, an outcome of pendidikan, in Islam and Secularism).

This is the real dilemma of education in Malaysia, the mushrooming growth of the spiritual pygmy, one armed with envious qualifications but lacking the critical moral core. It is not the struggle for Mandarin, English, Bahasa Malaysia or any other tool of education. On  English versus Bahasa Malaysia, I am always for bilingualism, but that’s a separate topic.

We should then look at the MEB and ask ourselves: Do we want to continue generating millions of so-called educated graduates from prestigious universities and colleges who have something critical missing in their being? Or do we want to start instilling the building blocks of ethics and integrity in our children when they enter school, before they acquire “high education”?

To put it bluntly, are we content with graduates who have showy degrees but are ethically challenged as human beings, or do we want our children to first have a solid ethical foundation? This is the question we should be asking in order to understand what education is all about.

All education-related NGOs have the same objective:  to make a man first, before embellishing him with outward credentials. Sad to say, the MEB  does not address this question of ensuring that we produce people of integrity as an imperative in education, a prerequisite to a better quality of life, and a necessity to achieve equality for all (as only a schooled mind is sensitive to the needs of others).

They say Japan is one country that knows its priority in education. Kindergarten pupils there are not taught school subjects at first but have to go around wearing pouches around their waist to pick up litter. This ingrains in them a habit of cleanliness that stays with them as adults, exemplified in a YouTube video post a World Cup match, which showed Japanese fans staying back to collect rubbish in plastic bags while others, who had strewn litter, nonchalantly walked away.

In Malaysia, beneath the ubiquitous “Denda membuang sampah RM500” signs, one can see rubbish and litter dumped by unschooled minds.

To be a great nation, not just high income but high touch (reference: Naisbitt’s High Tech, High Touch), we need to re-examine the meaning and objective of education. We want to develop people of integrity, not capricious individuals with an eye solely on profit. We need ethics to be our true north as many have fallen by the wayside when they forgot about being good (gelap mata in Malay) in their zeal to make it in plentiful Malaysia.

All of us  — Malays, Chinese, Indians and natives — want a blessed existence in a blessed nation (Negara Rahmat) and our focus should be on being a good person (the virtuous man, as per Plato and Confucius, or Insanul Kamil in Islam) first, before arming ourselves with good qualifications.

Being schooled need not mean having to go through the universities. It refers to a person who is rooted in integrity and ethics from a proper upbringing, one who does not look for straight As, but instead, strives to be a straight arrow. Muslim or non-Muslim, of whatever race or persuasion, we all want to live and die as good human beings. Now, this is what education is all about, methinks.


D. Ruse
Shah Alam

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