Changing faces of Malaysian Education … For Whom?

from Hornbill Unleashed by Hornbill Unleashed

Never let your schooling interfere with your education. —Mark Twain

By Bunga Pakma

My last effort left me feeling as though I had been rooting through a particularly fetid dumpster. Two weeks’ worth of showers has rendered me tolerably clean and fresh again, and most unwilling to return to the cess-pool. Others have been brave enough to dive in their turn. And so, today something different.

Not long ago here in Greater KL the festive time in the academic year rolled around once again. Every kolej, school and university in the Klang Valley and beyond was holding its Konvokesyen. The traffic grew much worse. Recently minted graduates thronged university gates after the pomp of the Vice-Chancellor’s speech and the awarding of degrees, garbed in scholarly robes and mortar-boards, clutching diplomas, bouquets of flowers and teddy bears given them by their parents and friends.

Next day most of these young people holding Bachelors of This-and-That woke up in their old room in their parents’ house. They’re feeling like kids again and wondering where the three years went, and what they went for.

They’re not the only ones asking the question. New grads are flooding into the job market, and the newspapers took the opportunity to re-run their yearly stories about young peoples’ dismal prospects. Commentators spoke with anguish—as they do once a year—of the Malaysian education system’s failure to teach students anything that renders them useful in the economy.

Meantime, for the past decade Malaysia has been transforming itself into a centre of schooling on an industrial scale. On trips to and from the airport I’ve been amazed at the number of buildings going up in Nilai. There’s a university for everything from nursing to multimedia. If we are free-market true believers it makes little sense to wail that the education-business is letting youth down. These new universities are commercial ventures and they turn out their “product” in immense volume. All these degree-holders must go somewhere.

This education they get is entirely technical. The conditions of the times are changing so rapidly that it is impossible to tell whether what one studies now will be of any use at all ten years ahead.

The last generation to have passed childhood in a traditional Dayak education must be those born in the late 1970s. Those born in the 1980s and after are a different type of people altogether.

When I first came to Kpg. Senyiur I stayed with my wife in my in-laws’ house until I could get mine ready. Piped water and electricity had not yet come to the village. Close by, just across a narrow lorong, dwelt a family—relatives, of course—consisting of man and wife, two young teenage daughters, and three smaller boys. The parents earned a living tapping rubber in their garden some miles away. They would often leave their children alone in the house and spend one night or several in the kebun getah.

The young boys amazed me. Weekday mornings before 6 o’clock I would hear commotion from next door as they woke up, lit the lamps and made their breakfast while singing. Then they washed the dishes, bathed in the river, dressed themselves in uniform and walked, carrying book-laden packs, to their school a mile away just as the sun was coming up.

Early afternoon we greeted them as they came back on the path. The boys then washed and hung out their clothes, bathed again, and did fun kid-things until it was time to light the lamps again, do homework, eat dinner and go to bed. An impressive display of savoir vivre for children in Primaries Three, Two and One, agi kulup. All this with little interference, as I noted, from their big sisters.

That decade from 1975 to 1985 was pivotal in many respects. The year 1980 was the last year when someone could still say that Sarawak’s forests were mostly intact, or perhaps it would be better to say that if logging had stopped in 1980, no irreparable harm would have been done. Many rivers still ran clear and pure. There was plenty to do in the kampong, in the forest and on the water. At the end of the day the boys would take out the sampan and fish for prawns, and I gratefully received many presents of small game.

It’s been an awful long time since the people of Kpg. Senyiur were picturesquely “primitive,” but 30 years ago the marrow of Dayak culture was robust. Television was still in the future. The instant television arrived, children stopped listening to their grandparents’ stories, which taught the values of self-reliance, confidence and courtesy.

My three young titular “nephews” enjoyed in this small space of a few years the best of both worlds. Up at the local primary school they learned the invaluable Three R’s, and at home they learned how to do all kinds of useful things—and do them well. They learned discipline, how to take care of themselves and how to get along with others. All this they learned painlessly, just as they learned their mother-language.

I have followed my “nephews’” fortunes over 25 years. They have done as well for themselves as I could have wished, in a most responsible way.

Yes, education should be useful, everywhere. There’s a question that begs to be asked: Useful for whom? When I look at the way industrial-scale education is heading in Malaysia today, I am inclined to believe that the students and eventual graduates are not the primary beneficiaries from the information they master. A trained work-force makes more money, some of it for themselves, and most of it for the people who own the corporate enterprises.

As most university education is now technical, and ultimately directed to profit, the nature of the job of lecturer has changed radically. Once, both East and West, the role of the lecturer was to train minds, to transmit learning (and if possible, wisdom) from the past towards the future existing in young minds. Now it seems that the lecturer is paid to teach the student to push the right buttons, while his main duty is to crank out research papers in the hope of hitting on a big and sellable idea.

Not all of us have had the advantage of growing up in a small, decent kampong amidst untouched nature and vigorous culture—both of which foster responsible freedom and control in one’s life. The Arts Faculty of a university was its core until not long ago, and the humanities strived to provide the cultural and moral anchor which we can lose so easily in urban life.

Sarawak was once self-sufficient in cultural wealth. When the environment is impoverished, that means the entireenvironment, the noösphere no exception.

Few hear it except me, but I do hear younger Sarawakians crying out against the enforced starving of their intellectual and aesthetic needs. There is not a single department in either Sarawak or Sabah devoted to the study of the humanities. The humanities are, like the trees, land and people, victims of “progress.”