Malaysia’s endangered minds: a Teacher’s Day essay
Azly Rahman
I am telling it like it is, as an educator who would like to see radical changes in the way we educate the curious young minds to excel to the fullest of their potentials and beyond. In a culturally, economically, and cognitively diverse country such as Malaysia, we ought to have put in place an education system that capitalises on the strength of our diversity rather that see the seeds of destruction grow into a forest of damnation and despair.
Many of the leaders in our society have spoken on the need for radical changes in our system.
Here are my thoughts for policymakers to take note and put into action:
We are endangering the minds of our children. Our education system is breeding mediocrity and an unthinking citizenry. Our curriculum is not challenging enough to meet the needs of globalisation and to create the next generation of children who will become global thinkers able to produce ideas and to translate them into artifacts and applications that would help advance the social, creative, critical, and ethical purpose of humankind.
There is a disjuncture between what we wish to showcase (e.g. the Multimedia Super Corridor or MSC and BioTech Nation) with what we are teaching children in school. We have created spaces of knowledge and power in the framework of education and national economic development.
We are only interested in producing a generation of students skilled in memorising facts and to regurgitate them when the need arises – we have little interest in giving birth to thinking citizens who are able to relate to each other inter-culturally, and able to be transformed into life-long learners, imbued with the passion of changing the nature of society and government when the ruling class no longer serves the interest of the rakyat/masses.
We have created many generations of followers and a silenced the majority, happily living their lives as one-dimensional beings, blind and mute to the massive corruption unfolding before their very eyes destroying the fabric of our ethical culture.
We are leaving our children in the hands of those who are ill-prepared to develop them into the “everyday genius”. We are full of slogans on success – “world-class this and that”, “regional hub for education”, “smart schools”, “vision schools”, “independent schools”, etc.
We are interested in rhetoric, in pleasing political visitors to our schools, in preparing our students to get 20As and to create showcase schools so that foreign and local corporations can also showcase their “generosity” and commitment to our educational system, paving the way for gentler and newer way of “glokal-styled” colonisation.
We are interested in cutting ribbons and displaying huge mock cheques and forcing our school-teachers to work long and late hours on things other than teaching and preparing for classes – on things that would only please the headmaster and the local politicians who do not have any idea how children develop cognitively.
We have been systematically killing the creativity of our teachers by burdening their minds with mundane activities to be completed out of unreasonable fear of authority.
We have successfully created classes of society through our classification system of schools and through the class ideology we directly or indirectly teach in our classrooms. We have schools for the rich and schools for the poor.
