Continuing my response to MM Lee's provocative comments, I would like to register my protest about his unsubstantiated claims and would instead focus on his blatant political agenda of sinicization of Singapore and, by extension, Southeast Asia.
My indignation was further fueled last night when NIA and I failed to find any signage that would lead us to KLPAC to watch 'Anak Bulan Di Kampong Wa' Hassan' by Alfian bin Sa'at (http://www.kakiseni.com), a play that captures the sense of dispossession/displacement among the Singapore Malays when the last Malay kampung succumbs to modernization. May I reiterate that my maternal family lived that very experience when our kampung homes and lifestyles at Kampung Melayu Kaki Bukit, Kampung Wa' Tanjung, Geylang Serai, Sembawang, etc. had to make way for "progress and development" in the form of factories and high-rise flats ("Flattened and flatted", according to my cousin).
Far from romanticising an idyllic Malay kampung life, especially in terms of hygiene, sanitation and drainage infrastructure, I found myself drawn into the discourse of alternative economic models some fifteen years ago while searching for the 'meaning' of development (see for example, No. 11 Treaty on Alternative Economic Models, http://habitat.igc.org/treaties/at-11.htm, published works of Sohail Inayatullah and Amartya Sen).
The dominant economic paradigm is at least one theory that MM Lee and MM (Mahathir Mohamad), Malaysia's former (?) PM, both embrace and uphold. The other would, of course, be their contested theory of eugenics that propunded the genetic and cultural inferiority of the Malays. The "soft", lethargic Malay Culture is the simple and perfect explanation for the "cultural deficit" thesis on "educational under-performance" of the Malays (and thus professional incompetency may I add) in the face of rapid Modernization and Globalization.
Here, I would like to argue, based on my own experience of teaching at both public and private institutions of higher learning for more than twenty years, it is generally vision and policy that determine the standards of excellence and the quality of academics and undergraduates rather than genetic and cultural factors. The consumer ethos towards education and knowledge, that is, students as "clients" and academic staff as "service providers", as succintly described in an article “On the Uses of a Liberal Education: I. As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students” (userwww.service.emory.edu/~pthoma4/Hirst-Maritain-Freire-Noddings-Edmundson.htm), is a major contributing factor to the deteriorating state of higher education here and elsewhere. So, allow me to state the painful truth that the intellectual quality and language proficiency, for both English and Bahasa Melayu, of local undergraduates, regardless of their ethnic background, have really gone down the drain over the last twenty years.
However, perhaps endemic to Malaysia is the self-defeating practice of instituting a zero-failure policy (in other other words, 100 percent passes) as a denial of reality (that there will be students who do not study and will, therefore, fail their examinations) or safeguard against disappointment, mostly amongst administrators and parents. That is the simple reason why we are churning out more and more sub-standard and unemployable graduates every year (www.islam-online.net/English/News/2006-09/09/05.shtml).
"Menang sorak, kampung tergadai" (Living in a fantasy world, that ignores current realities - a liberal translation) is the myth we live by as evidenced through speeches by elite champions of ethnic interests at convocation ceremonies which touted the phenomenal growth of student enrolment in a short period of time. The case of Nor Amalina Che Bakri who scored 17A1s in the 2004 SPM Exams and the unsavoury response to her achievement (blog.geminigeek.com/archives/2006/03/manual-spammer-is-stupid) is symptomatic of the residual impact of intense ethnic competition in the field of education. And Malaysians certainly do not need incitements to racial hatred and public discontent from neighboring leaders of state, south and north of the border (recently ousted and topic for another day) to further exacerbate ethnic rivalry. Amin.
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