April 22, 2005

  • A couple of years ago, former education director-general Tan Sri
    Murad Mohd Nor, commenting on a review on the national education system
    said the country needed "a national system, in which students in
    religious, private or national schools learnt the same things and
    shared the same philosophy."

    Recently, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Badawi in voicing his
    rejection to license more Chinese medium schools (and other vernacular
    schools) said that "...such schools where students share a
    curriculum and facilities, that students of different races will learn
    to bond with each other. This experience will benefit them tremendously
    and strengthen the bonds and unity the Government has been trying so
    hard to improve."

    Obviously not much has changed as far as education policies go. 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 in Reforming the Government Schools that, uniformity in education should be avoided as one of the 'very greatest calamities into which any nation can fall.'

    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 sameness.

    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.

dbctan

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