The fuss and fury around Cikgu Azizan

After six decades of nationhood, evolution dictates that the current generation of Malaysians should be stronger, tougher, smarter.

Or so one would think. Going by the brouhaha over Cikgu Azizan Manap’s slap of a student, however, we seem to have become only flabbier, with everyone working themselves into an emotional froth until the case went to court. But why did it get to that point? 

In my primary school years, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, kids weren’t foolish enough to get punished at school and return home to solicit sympathy from their parents. Because they’d kena lagi (get punished again).

The offences: Talking or eating in class, not doing your homework (the excuse that your dog chewed up your homework merited punishment more severe for unoriginality), forgetting to bring your textbooks, not paying attention or nodding off, secretly reading comics, and just being a dungu (nitwit).

The punishments (humiliation): Crossing your hands to pull your ears while doing squats, standing in a corner in front of the class, standing on your chair, standing on your desk for a more severe offence, standing in the corridor outside the class when the teacher can’t bear to be in the same room as your ugly mug, or melting in the middle of the badminton court under the hot sun for the whole school to snigger at.

The punishments (pain): The badminton court sojourn, which ends by getting acquainted with the rotan.

Teachers used the rotan on palms and behinds, rulers across palms or knuckles (which is more painful), slaps, and knocks on the head – from which we discovered that adults say one thing and do another, by trying to knock sense into our heads but knocking us senseless instead. Lesson learned: acquiring sense is painful.

My Standard Four Malay language teacher, though being adept at all of the above, still preferred the chalk duster hurl. Too bad his aim wasn’t very good, which often resulted in some collateral damage. But it didn’t matter to him, because offending students would still have to pick the duster up and bring it back to the front of the class for the honour of having their faces dusted.

But this teacher topped himself one day, when after asking me and two others to step aside, he hooked the offender by his neck using a hula-hoop and yanked him forward, sending tables and chairs flying – just so the student could be given a couple of knocks to the head.

Say what you will, fear of his wrath made me acquire my first smattering of the national language, by reading Pak Pandir, Si Lunchai and Sang Kancil stories.

The death sentence, of course, is to have you deliver a letter to your parents summoning them to school. Parents never showed up to berate teachers, but just showed up to find out the full extent of the crime(s).

Home will be hell for a few days, and no adults would report child abuse, because they were all part of an evil conspiracy agreeing that “kids nowadays ah, sooo difficult to bring them up, no respect. Lazy.”

My secondary school, aka Stalag VI, was modelled on a British public school which meant constant pain as a motivator.

In the first week, us pipsqueaks, proud that the school was one of only two schools in the country that had a swimming pool, found that before we could “play-play” in the pool, we had to do one length of it. You can walk half the length, water up to your chin or chest, but after that, it was swim or sink till you got to the end of the deep end.

It was an adult conspiracy

The offences that called for caning are too multiple to list. One of these was not wearing the school tie and badge outside school, regardless of the fact that doing so invited harassment from the puerile St John’s and MBS boys, not to mention the Cochrane Road School horde who kept penknives instead of pencil sharpeners.

For all age groups, there were qualifying standards for all track and field events. If the report card said you had failed to meet minimum requirements in sports and co-curricular activities, you’d get one stroke. And another for every failed subject.

The first day of each term was dripping with nerve-jangling anticipation as the sound of caning travelled along the ground floor, accompanying the handing out of the report cards. The upper forms upstairs could relax till Tuesday.

Were our parents filing multiple police reports? Nope. Told you it was an adult conspiracy. On two occasions, at the school’s annual speech day, the former menteri besar of Selangor Harun Idris and the former prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman had a similar message.

Harun, in his speech, told the headmaster to cane his son, Mazlan, if he needed it, and the PM told parents that if they were unhappy with the regime, they were free to transfer their children out. But no one did. Why would they, with the school’s excellent exam results?

It was a democracy of pain and we kids hated it, but who’s to say this form of boot camp education instructed by Attilas-in-waiting must be replaced by a creative awakening of students’ sensitive souls?

Many of my schoolmates are successful in their professions. As far as I know, none of us were traumatised. It toughened us. Lost a few who went down the roads of drugs and crime, but that’s a statistical inevitability.

I won’t rehash the truism that many of the students couldn’t express themselves with much coherence. Just this memory from my first job after graduation at Taylor’s College in the late 1970s.

A colleague’s student, a Sarawakian boy renting a room in Bangsar, had been caught trying to burgle a neighbour’s house. He was a heroin addict. The father, a senior government officer, did the usual Malaysian thing, pulled strings, and the case was closed.

The colleague and I stayed by the boy’s side for two days and nights while he went cold turkey, screaming and vomiting. The neighbouring building was a hostel for the nuns from Assunta Hospital. What they must have thought!

Besides money for his rent and books, he was getting RM1,600 a month in pocket money, which was more than my salary. Why so much? “He said things were expensive in KL.”

Taking the son back to Sarawak for the term break, the father thanked us profusely, invited us over for a Thanksgiving kenduri.

But one night, at the start of the final term, he was at the gate of my colleague again for a couple more nights of cold turkey.

Happy that the son was clean of drugs the first time, the father had rewarded him with RM5,000 for him and his friend to have a holiday in Singapore.

After a couple of days there, they had the brainwave to return to KL, buy heroin in bulk and feed their habit while dealing. Only they skipped the latter.

During this second bout of cold turkey, I occupied myself with figuring out what punishment was suitable for the father. Caning or the instruments of the Spanish Inquisition? Not enough.

Only Edgar Allan Poe’s rat torture, or Japanese bamboo torture would have sufficed.

My school experience probably brutalised my imagination. But I can’t complain.

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THOR KAH HOONG is a veteran journalist.- Mkini