COMMENT The needlessly complex Malaysian education system has been drawing criticism and ridicule for decades. It deserves the bad press, for it produces curricula that bore students, it overworks teachers, it emphasises rote learning and downplays critical thinking, and it is geared towards producing citizens looking for that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Still, this is not to say that everything about the system is bad. Perhaps, though, some things that are bad need not actually be.
Some say the system has just been plodding along with few meaningful modifications since it was inherited from the British.
Students are herded into barns masquerading as classrooms and are kept behind their desks for 10 to 15 years, learning what the authorities want them to learn. Little thought is given to dealing with individual needs and perhaps even less to encouraging individual creativity. Students are churned out like factory products to meet manpower needs in the demand and supply equation.
Everyone knows that education deserves all the attention it can get. That is probably why every new education minister wants new reforms and new approaches, as if students are guinea pigs.
The hard-hitting question should be: what good does the system do to our young? Is it enough that it should convert boys and girls into factory and office workers or, if they go through tertiary institutions, into bureaucrats, teachers, doctors, engineers, cyber troopers and other professionals?
Or should the system ensure that education, besides preparing citizens for gainful employment, also enables them to seek and recognise truth in all its manifestations?
Unfortunately that is a tall order.
Material world
Drug and chemical abuse, criminal misconduct and sexual irresponsibility have been increasing over the years.
Between 2000 and 2004, the number of juveniles in Malaysian prisons increased from 2,308 to 2,964. Statistics for 2005 showed that on average seven schoolchildren were arrested every day, three of them between the ages of 13 and 15.
According to the National Drug Agency’s statistics, 78.67% of drug abuse cases detected between January and December 2008 were users who had dropped out of school at age 15.
The situation has not improved.
Will Hutton, former editor-in-chief of the Observer, wrote in 2008:
“Families are mini-civilisations. Experience and research show they are the best means of rearing our young into fulfilled adulthood.”
He warned, however, that over-protective families could be like prisons that could deform young individuals for life.
In short, the debate continues over whether either or both the education and family systems have failed to guide children towards happy and fruitful lives.
“Money and material objects have become very important, often to the exclusion of social generosity and cooperation. Theoretical knowledge has become very important, often to the exclusion of adherence to religious beliefs.” This was the consensus of a 1997 forum audaciously advertised as the Future of Malaysia.
Cardinal virtue
When the family institution breaks down and moral values erode in a rapidly changing society, the first victims are naturally the young.
Unlike modern-day parents who disapprove of physical punishment of schoolchildren, our forefathers used to thank teachers for dispensing punishment for misbehaviour and indiscipline.
In ancient China, the purpose of sending children to school was to prepare them to be good human beings, if not to become saints and sages. It was not to pave for them the road to material fortune or vain fame.
Teaching them young was critical in ensuring that they grow into well-disciplined and virtuous citizens.
Many educationists and social workers today acknowledge that there is a fatal departure in modern society from the values that were held sacrosanct in the olden days.
“Yi dai bur u yi dai,” according to an old Chinese saying. Paraphrased, it means: each generation is worse than the one before it.
The fault in modern education can be summed up in another piece of folk wisdom: “shi nian shu mu, bai nian shu ren”— one can nurture a tree for 10 years, but it takes a hundred years to train a human being.
In ancient times, particularly during the heyday of Confucianism, Di Zi Gui was taught as part of the school curriculum. It was a guide to discipline and appropriate behaviour.
It was crucial to teach the young their role in the family and to guide them to be dutiful towards parents and teachers. Filial piety is a cardinal virtue in all traditional cultures.
According to the Di Zi Gui, “When my parents call me, I will answer them right away. When they ask me to do something, I will do it quickly.
“When my parents instruct me, I will listen respectfully. When they reproach me, I will accept their scolding and obey. I will try hard to change and improve myself, to start anew.”
What happens when the parents are wrong?
The forgotten guidance
The guide has an answer to this. “When my parents do wrong, I will ask them to change. I will do it with a kind expression and a warm gentle voice.
“If they do not accept my advice, I will wait until they are in a happier mood before I attempt to counsel them again, followed by crying, if necessary, to make them understand.
“If they end up whipping me, I will not hold a grudge against them.”
The guide also says: “When my parents are ill, I will taste the medicine first before giving it to them. I will take care of them night and day and stay by their bedside.”
The Confucian teachings also show the young the different ways of behaving towards younger siblings, towards older siblings, towards relatives, and towards friends.
Today’s debate on education overlooks the important objective of producing decent and upright human beings. It ignores what is common sense in Confucian thinking, “guo ren hen lan, guo hao ren ken lan,” which can be rendered as follows:
“If it is difficult to conduct oneself properly as a human being, imagine how difficult it is to be morally upright and virtuous.”
In truth, the role of education in modern times has lost sight of that glorious objective of providing a true guide to a happy life. When the family institution, as the smallest unit in a nation, gradually breaks down, society inevitably suffers.
What, then, is the price we are paying for this failure? The answer becomes obvious when we reflect upon the behaviour of the people who are supposed to be our leaders.
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