ARE YOU A TEACHER? OR AN INDOCTRINATOR?

ARE YOU A TEACHER?
OR AN INDOCTRINATOR?
- Notes for a Memoir 

by Azly Rahman

The essence of the next level of progress is good teaching and how to train the young to be practitioners and generalists. And respect and appreciate diversity and social justice of course. 

We have poor communicators in the universities these days who are only interested in forcing the young mind how to submit to ideologies. 

My experience in this difficult dialogue of BlackLivesMatter-AllLivesMatter has revealed how much shallowness has pervaded the thinking of many of the academics who have stopped learning, yet wished to continue teaching, for economic-survival reasons. Slogans are what they feed on and they feed each other in joyous festivity. Life-long learning is abandoned. 

Some of these people teach Anthropology, Critical Media Studies, Political Science, Creative Writing -- from far away places such as Melbourne, Negeri Sembilan, Chicago, Bangi, Pantai Dalam, Penang and all. What was the dissertation defense about then?

So-- it is a global network of one-dimensionalism, as the American Marxist Herbert Marcuse would term, of those who ought to be teaching their students how to respect diverse points of view, as Voltaire would enjoin. We can't have our own "anthropological veto" on opinions we disagree if we are a teacher of Anthropology, we can't be blind to the way media too has shaped our consciousness and render us hegemonized beyond repair, if we are a teacher of Critical Media Studies, or we cannot be teaching our students the dangers of the "One-Single-Story", if we are a teacher of Creative Writing, if we fail to respect multiple genres of storytelling and narratives -- all these are faulty thinking in what we, as progressive educators, do in our work, developing the human mind in all its complexity.

Else we will belong to the new class of educators called the Academic-Talibans. Hopefully we are not. Read some of the work on the idea of thinking: by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey, to have a sense of what teaching can and ought to be about.

Today, perhaps, those who have differing opinions are being ganged-up upon and against. Even though the world of academia is about promoting dialectical thinking: seeing the ideas synthesizing --- from the actions of thesis and antithesis --- until one arrives at the meaning, phenomenologically-speaking. Alas-- the greatest enemy of knowledge is ignorance, if not the illusion of knowledge, let alone the believe that it is the truth and nothing but the truth though produced by some billionaire in Wall Street somewhere.

Logic bubbles that celebrate uninformed and uninvestigated ideologies backed by some billionaire rogue currency-trader are what these academics live in comfortably, knowingly or otherwise.

Our children in universities demand better instructors that would celebrate diversity in thinking rather that be stuck and presumably in awe in classrooms run like thought-control camps in some jungle in Baling, Kedah or Bentong, Selangor. There is more to teaching than just this method. Because as an educator, all lives should matter. And all opinions should be respected and celebrated.

I enjoy all kinds of music: rock, jazz, classical, kronchong, dangdut, Rock Kapak Johor, rap, hip hop, and music that pleases my soul. I like works of art that give me keys, windows, doors, insights to the different period: Classical, Neo-Classical, Baroque, Roccocco, Impressionism, Dadaism, and even Cubism which is said to be inspired by Fascism of the Third Reich.

I respect those with differing ideologies as they bring merriment of idea to Humanity, as they bring to the often-times intense discussions in my classroom -- be they Marxism, Capitalism, Progressivism, Essentialism, or whatever new "ism" that have emerged. I don't cancel them out nor call the owners of the ideas unpleasant names just because they blurted out OpinionsThatMatter to them.

We do not and should not own the minds of the younger generation. Our job is to give them enough tools to master their destiny -- based on the future in which the old would have died. Yes, the old will die with whatever ideology they have lived by.

I suggest these kinds of instructors take courses in how to teach -- or not teach at all. By sanctioning, rationalizing, patronizing, and even lecturing on the virtues of violence in making radical social change, they do not deserve to be further employed by their institutions.

I wonder what they do in their classes. Do they fail students who give the opinion in class discussions that "all lives matter"? Troubling to imagine this idea of indoctrination, rather than "teaching."

(PHOTO: University of Nottingham, UK. Panel Discussion on the future of education, 2019)