25 August 2003

The Seduction of Sameness

Posted by DAVID BC TAN under: Uncategorized.

It appears that the Ministry of Education is now ready to introduce significant changes (again!) to the Malaysian education system. According to a report in the STAR dated August 15, former education director-general Tan Sri Murad Mohd Nor, who heads a special committee said the review was meant to create “a national system, in which students in religious, private or national schools learnt the same things and shared the same philosophy.”

It was thought that a shared national educational experience was desirable, as it would enhance national unity. Now, what was our education system doing all these years since Merdeka, if not to provide a shared national experience? And look where it has led us all. Uniformity is not the same as unity.

While it is fine that all children should have equal and similar access to education, it is doubtful if cookie cutter education is the way forward.

For one, it assumes that everyone develops or possesses the intellectual-emotional capacity to learn at the same pace (and on cue), while ignoring the gifted and differently-abled. Worse, the state sells her people short when in the same breath we are urged to think outside the box, dare to be different (!), etc. Someone wrote that if you process kids through such a system, what you get are McKids, and not well-educated, resourceful, innovative adults suited to the competitive world of the 21st century.

Secondly, it overlooks the fact that similar sights do not produce similar thoughts. A case in point: 2 persons viewing say, the KL Twin Towers, do not necessarily ’see’ the same thing nor form similar conclusions. One says, “Mammon!” while the other, “Mammoth!”

But there is certainly one thing that standardised mandatory public education will do: it will make our kids compliant conformists and therefore, more easily manipulated.If it seems like a moot point today, ask Hitler what he thought way back in 1933 when he seized kindergartens and schools, rewrote textbooks to emphasise Germanism “Blut und Boden” (Blood and Soil) and made membership in Hitler Youth compulsory:

“When an opponent says, I will not come over to your side. I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already’. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.”

How chillingly prescient theologian J. Gresham Machen was when in 1925 he wrote that, uniformity in education should be avoided as one of the ‘very greatest calamities into which any nation can fall’ (Reforming the Government Schools).

I am not convinced when politicians tell us they have only the best intentions in mind. I appreciate that running a country is difficult business involving complex and sensitive political realities. That is why governments around the world are easily seduced by the ideology of uniformity. But we should all be for more educational access, more diverse schooling choice, and not just improved (least of all, standardised) curriculum for all. Since that won’t come any time soon, count me out of the system. I’m taking ownership of my children’s education, and their future. Right now, my vote’s on homeschool.

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