Save our schools

Education minister Fadhlina Sidek wants “to create an education system that nurtures children and youths into becoming well-adjusted, morally grounded and positive contributors to the nation’s growth”.

Juxtapose this with viral videos of students and teachers at several public schools toting replica guns and waving Palestinian flags in response to her introducing the Palestine Solidarity Week in schools. Other videos showed students and teachers stomping on a nation’s flag vehemently.

Does this look like we are nurturing children to become “well-adjusted” and “morally grounded” people? Will such students be “positive contributors to the nation’s growth”?

As the nation watched aghast at these parades of balaclava and replica guns in school, Fadhlina responded by saying “there would be no compromise on the unauthorised use of elements of extremism or violence during the Palestine Solidarity Week”.

“The use of replica weapons, icons and symbols in a confrontational manner is strictly prohibited,” she added. “The Palestine Solidarity Week, which will be held at all educational institutions under the purview of the education ministry from Oct 29 until Nov 3, is aimed at educating children on values such as human rights, peace, harmony and universal peace.”

Well, hype springs eternal.

Confronted with this yet-to-be-admitted faux pas, Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said such things “need to be controlled”.

Unthinking minds are like vacant land with dry grass. All it takes is just a spark to get a fire going. And that fire can easily become a wildfire, uncontrollable once started.

A wise decision would have been to cancel the programme. Instead, Anwar said “we encourage the organisation of such programmes but we won’t force all schools to participate”.

That such political indoctrination should be kept out of schools seems to have escaped him.

That the question of how children process such traumatic actions in their young minds, seems to have not occurred to him.

The real victims of such oversight are our children. Already suffering from an anaemic education system, they should not be directed to such political persuasions that are hard to explain even to educated adults.

Professor Yuval Noah Hariri said “war is a continuation of politics by other means”. In my view, education and indoctrination could be among such other means. We can use these to nurture the love for peace and non-violence.

I really wonder what guides the thinking and actions of our nation’s leaders. They seem to be groping in the dark for things they do not even know that they don’t know.

Such a move as the school balaclava-weapons fiasco should have been quickly nipped in the bud. It is folly not to do so.

We all recognise that there are so many things that need to be done to improve our education system. While we wait for concrete ideas, we are instead fed with yadda-yadda academic platitudes spun from the cob-webbed pages of pedantry. And now this display of sheer foolishness is so unnecessary.

In a way, the recalcitrance of not remedying the mistake frighteningly shows us the face of our leadership. It is that of arrogance and chauvinism.

This posture was also detected in the directive by Anwar that letters received by government departments that are not in the Malay language will be rejected and returned to the sender.

So, if Elon Musk writes to the investment, trade and industry ministry in English, regarding investments in Malaysia, will his email be rejected? Will there be an automated reply that says “Return to Sender. Unless you write to us in Malay, you will not be entertained”? Or will Little Napoleons just simply ignore all correspondence that are not in Malay?

Given this directive, it is likely that the actions and thinking of our civil servants may be hard to control; as can be seen in the case of the Palestine Solidarity Week programme and the case of the ignominious dress code to enter government departments and agencies.

What in the world do we hope to benefit from such a chauvinistic directive on language? What does it show the world? What impression will foreign investors have of us?

The last I looked, “respect” was one of the values of the Madani slogan. Are we respecting others with this arrogance? Another value is “prosperity”. Is this language directive investor-friendly?

Too bad “humility” is not among the Madani values. It should be.

Stonewalling on reformist promises is something that has long puzzled civil society in the past 11 months of the Madani reign. By now, perhaps it should have sunk in – all the bravado and the boasting merely indicate pseudo-intellectualism and a real lack of capability.

We were taken in by grandiose promises of things that will never be. We saw in our leaders what we wanted them to be and not what they really were.

In GE15, we voted with hopeful hearts and when the unity government emerged, we thought the fields would be fresh and full again with fruit. We got lemons.

What is scarier is that we look around and we strain to see signs of any recognisably competent leader to take us forward. The huge brain drain over the past decades has come to fruition. Our well is running dry.

The tragedy is, we all know the causes of this brain drain but we are constrained to discuss them.

One of the major causes is our education system. Please save our schools. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.