Behind the mirror of our educational vision

Opinion  |  Azly Rahman

Published: Today 7:08 pm  |  Modified: Today 7:08 pm

   

COMMENT | I was invited to speak about education and progress. The topic given? "Polished Education, Boundless Mentality". Strangely framed, as I read it the first time around. What does "polished Malaysian education" look like? What reality will we see? How does this relate to "boundless mentality"? It will be in Nottingham England, the land of Robin Hood who stole from the rich, to give to the poor. A nice story of today’s economic ideology.

Polishing a definition

When I hear a word or phrase, I will first think about what it means and next dismantle it entirely, reconstructing it next. If you "polish" Malaysian education, like cleaning a mirror, will you see beauty? Or ugliness? Peace? Violence? I see words and phrases like a Wittgenstein and Chomsky combined, then I'll do the Foucault and Rushdie on them.

The Sufi will "polish" the mirror to see the "reality" of the self. To become “the insanul-kamil as Jalaluddin Rumi would say, the human self in all its glory as St Francis Assisi would say, the bodhisattva as the Prince Siddhartha Gautama would say, the jen or gentleman as Master Kung Fu Tze would say, or the android with a true human heart and soul in an age of advanced machines, as post-humanists would say”.

How do we evolve at the highest polished level and realise that what we have, the world within is larger than the world outside, and that both worlds must be made to harmonise in order for us not to be enslaved by the forces in society that operate within the strict paradigm of the master-slave narrative, from then, now, till eternity?

But, speaking about “polished and boundlessness, what is our reality as a nation calling ourselves Malaysian? Our education today is a façade, a mirror painted with images of niceties, hiding a violent reality. How do we "Finnish or Nipponise or Singaporise" our education when we have a broken mirror to see ourselves?

Behind the mirror

Behind the mirror we try to polish lies the structure of inequality based on race and religious bigotry. We ignore completely that a "polished education" will not make sense when the object we are polishing is built with the rust of racism and class. When all the races continue to call for a better apartheid system, in approach and in funding, we cannot have a polished system.

Today's ruling regime has no sense of what it means to educate our children to have "boundless mentality". Race is still the key. The eyes that see education must be the ones not blind to racial discrimination or religious extremism as an ideology. As long as we have the ruling party addicted to race-based policies, we shall not see "boundless mentality". With today's complete morphing of Pakatan Harapan into the new BN, Bersatu into Umno 3.0, what do we expect for educational equality?

Still, I am trying to deconstruct the meaning of the topic 'Polished Education, Boundless Mentality'. Can we have it? Without understanding the inextricable link between sustainability, human rights, peace and social justice, how can we proceed?

A child is born with "boundless mentality" but schooling for racial inequality will kill his or her dignity. If there is a "Malaysian Dream" for a child, it is to be treated equally - with dignity, with merit, and with empathy. Talks of love, happiness, and respect alone are not enough to heal our educational sickness. We need the right diagnosis and treatment.

We have misdiagnosed the problem and next, we have sent the patient to a bomoh who heals with mantra, puja, and more doa. The patient has been sent by those who speak of education as if it is a happy camp that must be run by the Talibans dressed in three-piece suits, scheming on what ideology to promote in our addiction to a newer form of the New Economic Policy. What promise to make, using elegant rhetoric of educational reform, not grounded in the reality of where we ought to be heading and the multicultural society we are living in.

An unpolished education

We can't have a "polished education" when the system is run by corrupted men designing corrupted machines. Those who are polishing education are not Sufis, Sadhus, Buddhist monks. They are politicians not interested in the true image of Man. Our educational direction is an act of polishing power and wealth and not to promise a sustainable future. Teachers, too, do not quite understand what "education" or from the Latin "educare" means.

One can "polish" education using the chemical concoction of a variety of educational missions and visions to give it a different lustre. The traditionalists, the progressives, the socialists, the religionistas, the technologists - these are polishers of education. How can the child in class be turned into a "boundless mentality" when the school is plagued with religious bigots? How can a child learn about cultural understanding when the curriculum promotes a truncated version of nationalism?

See, why it is difficult to find a link between "polished education" and "boundless mentality" - this conceptual vagueness? Philosophical thinking is key to understanding phenomena and how words are used to define them. The unpolished Malaysian education system, poorly conceived philosophically, has produced bad politicians and robber-barons are always finding ways to destroy the nation.

Unpolished education has produced more sophisticated race and religious -based parties and newer Umno and BN. Unpolished education has produced rulers and leaders who plunder nature until cities turn into Orange Planets! Unpolished education has produced a blind mass that still supports kings of thieves who stole "boundless and mad money". Unpolished education has made the masses silenced over the most urgent issues plaguing the fate of our planet. Instead of producing people with "boundless mentality", we made leaders with boundless appetite for expensive but useless things.

A final question

So, that's going to be my brief presentation for a longer, and more engaging discussion on the topic of "polished education, boundless mentality". Quite a grim view, I must say. But that is what I am seeing as we polish the mirror - seeing the origin of ideas, implementation of policies, structuring and restructuring of societies, beginning with the work of our first minister of education, and scanning Malaysia’s evolutionary markers of economic and ideological change - perceiving and now, predicting the trajectories of human capital revolution, and national global development.

My conclusion: we still cannot see the complexity of the “butterfly effects” of things. We become like blind men and women looking at an elephant. Yes, that elephant in our living room.

My final case-study question: How is the campaign in Semenyih an example of "polished education and boundless mentality"? Help me deconstruct this notion of Malaysian education and social change as we enter the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” - not knowing what it means, what it entails, and how we should brace ourselves, as a country still, after more than 60 years of Independence, yet happy with the chains we redesign and put on ourselves. I leave you a quote, from the philosopher of the French Revolution, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “man is born free yet everywhere he is in chains”. What then must we do?