MALAYSIAN HISTORY ‘SODOMISING OUR YOUNG MINDS’

Pix: Lifted from CPI

By Sharifuddin A. Latiff

This podcast — click to listen — was put up at CPI (see blogroll on your right).

It’s a type of new media not many Malaysians are familiar with and the podcast highlighted by the Centre for Policy Initiatives website is by its director Dr Lim Teck Ghee who was interviewed by Bfm yesterday.

Speaking on the radio station’s Current Affairs programme, Dr Lim homed in on the five chapters covering Islam in the Form 4 History textbook which has 10 chapters in total.

Giving his view of the History syllabus in Malaysian secondary school curriculum, he said, “This emphasis on Islamic history is the result of a creeping process of Islamic religion seeping into everything [slightly inaudible] in the public sector”.

Dr Lim called the emphasis on Islamic history a “politicization” of education and a dissemination of “religious propaganda”. Referring to the centrality of Islam in the curriculum, he argued that “this provides a very badly distorted perspective of history”.

He said it is “a very dangerous line to push out in the school system, [a] misguided attempt at influencing young minds by shutting these young minds out to the other cultures and civilizations that have made the world and this country what it is today”.

Dr Lim added the approach limited the students’ thinking rather than providing global perspectives that’s necessary. “This is akin to sodomising our young minds by trying to lock them into knowledge and values that belong to religious institutions of the medieval ages rather than of the modern world.

“And what can you expect when the textbook has been written mainly by Islamic scholars …”

As our regular readers will be aware, this blog has devoted some amount of space to the Caliph Umar Lim Abdul Aziz who’s the keenest promoter of Islam in everything, including his own party affairs.

Guan Eng has constantly been praising the glorious Islamic civilization, so much so that he could easily be parroting from the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka History textbook.

What does GE Lim have to say to the charges made by TG Lim? Surely the party supporters would like to hear the DAP sec-gen’s position on this important issue that has got parents and students worried due to the compulsory pass required in SPM.

courtesy of Hartal MSM