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From cow-headed to level-headed education

Posted by admin

Thursday, 10 September 2009 10:41

Azly Rahman
http://azlyrahman-illuminations.blogspot.com/2009/09/take-five-for-rock-guitar-fans-like-me.html

How must we re-educate those who protested in such a style against the relocation of a Hindu temple? What gross deficiencies in our educational system contributed to the creation of beings that displayed such hatred?

What then must we do to reverse the evolution of hate groups sponsored by those who wish to sustain the dying ideology of ethnic politics?

These are the difficult questions Malaysian children will inherit. In the cow-head protest there were children involved; those tender young minds who will hopefully understand what respect for race, ethnicity, and religion means.

Hopefully they will be strong enough to release themselves from the shackles of hatred, after 52 years of Malaysia's independence.

We must blame the continuing survival of communal politics for the creation of hate-based groups. Because our Independence is an illusion and Malaysia is an imagined community that is thriving on rhetoric and slogans, we have a fragile system of in-breeding of hyper-modernised politics of hate.

Because the insatiable urge for wealth and power necessitates the maintenance of 'politics of divide-and-conquer and rule through racial annihilations', we are heading towards a brink of destruction. We will see more 'cow-head' antics orchestrated form time to time in order for organized chaos to reign.

We must blame the contradictions and the hypocrisy in the translation of our national educational philosophy for the display of the cow-head politics we are witnessing.

Though the philosophy, mission, and vision of our educational system is elegantly worded and loudly trumpeted, we have hidden hands orchestrating the game of divide and rule and segregation. Underneath the canopy of the elegance of the rhetoric lie structural violence; a base and superstructure of politics of race that has come to a breaking point.

The way Malaysians school their children - from pre-kindergarten to post-graduate levels - is characterised by the insistence that race-politics must be propagated by all means necessary. Narratives on what Malaysia is - drawn from kampong folks to retired professors - oftentimes reflect the same theme: maintain race-politics and let this or that race dominates.

We must blame the mainstream media as agents of race-based and racist socialisation for shaping race and class consciousness in a Malaysia badly in need of a way out of racial intolerance; a path charted wrongly for the sake of glorifying greed over virtue, wants over needs, and indoctrination over education guised in the name of blind patriotism.

The media as an extension of the state now has life of its own profiting from the manufacture of chaos and the production of conflict. In time of economic troubles when the masses are suffering while the elite are still conspicuously consuming, the media will have a ball of a time translating repressed emotion into a reason to project mass anger against this or that race.

The British colonials did a wonderful job in perception management - divide and conquer the natives and create perceptions of this or that superiority amongst them so that they will not see the bigger picture. Hitler did a good job at this too. Stir up emotions during that time of economic depression, tell repeated lies, and create an enemy of the state, and next get those millions of young Germans to join the Nazi party.

'Indoctrinated nation'

We must also blame ourselves for not educating our children enough in matters of racial and religious tolerance. We have failed to tell our children that the Malay, Chinese, Indian, Sikh, Kadazan, Iban, and hybridised groups they see in their classrooms and in the neighborhood are fellow-Malaysians and part of what our country has evolved into.

How could our children be taught to hate this or that group when their teachers - the managers and transmitters of virtue - are of this or that race?

The cow-head politics we saw in Selangor last week is a grim picture of how our educational institution is failing to create a citizenry that celebrates diversity and willing to learn about each other's religious belief. In essence, we have become an 'indoctrinated' rather than an educated nation, a furious 52-year-old rather than a forgiving one ready to meet its Maker.

As a nation we are drowning in dangerous waters; from a flash flood we created. Bahtera Merdeka is sinking. How do we save ourselves? How do we evolve out of this cow-head politics we are witnessing.

Again, we must turn to education and the radical restructuring of it. Education as a gentle profession and a powerful enterprise for social and personal progress must be restructured. Its philosophy must be recaptured.

But what philosophical orientation must we embrace? Social reconstructionism and education for spiritual capitalism perhaps. For too long we have been trumpeting 'human capital', 'educational for national development', 'education for nation-building' and all those fancy words we blindly borrow from the pages of work of modernisation theorists and post-industrialist theorists.

These have become meaningless. We are living with the contradictions of the manifestations of these words that have been translated into policies.

What we need is not a better educational philosophy that will make our children more sophisticated racists and aspiring robber barons. We have a generation of these already. What we need is a philosophy sound enough to create a powerful generation that will care for fellow human beings and ones that understands that the Earth's resources are enough for one's need and not for one's greed, as Gandhi said.

Ah, we have made a wrong turn in history. But education is still about hope and love. Evolve we must - from cow headed to level-headed education.

OUR USUAL REMINDER, FOLKS:
While the opinion in the article is mine,
the comments are yours;
present them rationally and ethically.
AND -- ABOLISH THE ISA -- NOW!

Comments (6) Add Comment

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written by Ken Liew, September 10, 2009 11:30:06

when someone think they are smart... where they actually DONT.

It really makes TONS of problem.

Beside, Our Court are making Malaysia a Circus. Where the only show is the JOKERS making Joke all around.

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written by temenggong, September 10, 2009 12:15:19

The primary failing is in not giving a proper account of Malayan history. Instead Malaya is projected as a land of the malays and recent immigrants. Malays have been lied to, and the end result of that lie is the cowhead incident, a precursor of more incidents to come.

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written by astina, September 10, 2009 12:22:26

Dr Azly

The cow head thing is not due to the education system ..its entirely due to greed of umNO leaders .
The thirst of power and the cow rich Selangor state ..
They had lost their cashflow and tried everything possible to create problems for the current PR goverment .
I do believe all those 50 thugs are working in multinational corporations and do not find any issues with the Indians (or Hindus)

The root cause to all this social disinteragation is our 2nd PM and our 4th PM ..
They promoted economic uplifting for the sons of soils while neglecting the social intergration we used to enjoy in all sectors and in some cases even in sports ..

the root cause is umNO (baru dan lama) and nothing else...

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written by Proarte, September 10, 2009 12:23:22

The only solution is to separate race and religion from politics. Both PAS and UMNO feed Malay insecurity about their faith and physical existence.

If religion was a personal matter then Malays can intellectualise on issues regarding their faith and will invariably come up ideas of morality which are universal and edifying.

The universality of morality and equality of human beings is the biggest threat to racial and religious politics. They have a vested interest in division and discrimination. The contradiction between religious tenets and the modus operandi of these political parties is glaring , that is why coercion, misinformation and deception are the only ways to keep the Malays trusting and faithful. But this clearly is at the expense of the intellectual development and moral awareness of the community.

A glaring example of this contradiction between Islam and the 'Islamic jihad' is the thuggery, intimidation and choice swear words such as 'puki mak' used by these latter day Malay jihadist who were hell bent on demolishing the more than 100 year old Sri Mahamariaman temple and opposing its relocation to another site. All this criminality was done in the name of Islam and has the tacit approval of the vast majority of Malays in Shah Alam.

To date there has not been a sizeable or credible Malay grouping in Shah Alam supporting the right of Sri Mahamariaman to exist. Unfortunately the Malays through the media, political and religious discourse have it inculcated in their minds that Islam is 'purified' when religious symbols or structures of other faiths are 'cleansed' ( read destroyed ). This is a Saudi Wahabi importation which has caused so much havoc and strife throughout the world. To this day, no Jewish or Christian let alone Hindu religious symbol or place of worship can be publicly displayed or built in Saudi Arabia. This clearly is unIslamic but then anything emanating from Saudi is promoted as 'gospel' by the Malay political masters and believed as such by the vast majority of Malays. The purpose is to divide and rule. It has nothing to do with morality or the observance of religions injunctions.

Pakatan has no reason to ride the high horse over the Sri Mahamariman temple outrage.In the first place it should be granting 'Heritage' status to the temple thus at the stroke of a pen making it a legal structure. It does not do so because it has made the calculation that it too has to appease Malay bigotry and intolerance and Indian rights have to be sacrificed. They have so quickly forgotten all those lofty promises they made to Hindus saying their citizenship and religious rights and dignity would be regarded as 'sacrosanct' when they come to power. What an unconscionable betrayal!

There is no cogent reason to demolish it. If the temple is attracting a larger crowd and causing traffic problems then it follows that the local Hindu community require more temple space and the Section 23 proposed relocation site should house an additional temple.

We now learn the the fascist Malay Muslim group called Pewaris illegally appropriated a sizebale chunk of the land in the temple environs depriving car parking space to the devotees thus adding to the traffic woes and inconvenience to residents when there are large temple gatherings. To add insult to injury, there have been occasions where they have slaughtered cows during prayer ceremonies.

As things stand, the status quo has been tolerated by the vast majority of the affected folk who see this as part of living in multi-religious Malaysia, similar to Friday prayers where all Malaysians have to put up with horrendous traffic at times on a weekly basis. It is only when Muslims are whipped up into a religious frenzy that they forget that Hindus too are humans and have a right to religious worship and a right to dignity.

Demolishing a Hindu temple is really a reflection of the true worth of Muslims and the religion they claim to worship.

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written by asguard, September 10, 2009 12:29:55

Blame UMNO....this and that... that is right thing to do...for they are behind every inch of the incident!

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written by Loh, September 10, 2009 18:21:33

///How must we re-educate those who protested in such a style against the relocation of a Hindu temple? What gross deficiencies in our educational system contributed to the creation of beings that displayed such hatred?///-- Azly Rahman

If the suggestion that what happened in the country is due to the people going through the education system in the country, right through the university level, then think again. The person who defended the cow-head procession is a lawyer trained in United Kingdom. If the university education in UK has not made him internalised his understanding that in the modern world, men are born equal, and entitled to equal opportunity, can we suggest that the education system in the United Kingdom is at fault? Is Kerismuddin justified to consider Malaysia remains in the dark ages, even before the English peasantsâ€™ revolt of 1381?

However one wants to distort Malaysian history, the fact remains that Malaya was British colony until we gain independence in 1957. The parties that presented the case for independence agreed to the so-called social contract in the form of the constitution of Malaya, which was later adapted as Constitution of Malaysia when other â€˜nation statesâ€™ joined to from Malaysia on 16 September 1963. Under the Malayan constitution in force in 1957 Independence Day, Article 153 which provided for the quota system as affirmative actions for Malays was subject to review after 15 years. The caveat in the form of review shows that the quota system was included based on needs, not on rights, and it could be subject to means test. It was however considered that since the majority of those in need were Malays, Malays were offered the special assistance. The assistance given to Malays in Peninsular Malaysia was extended to natives of Sabah and Sarawak.

Article 153 was to be reviewed in1972, but it was overtaken by events in 1969. NEP was implemented in 1970 for twenty years, according to the late Tun Razak. Malaysians would have perceived that after 20 years of NEP, it would end along with Article 153, which justified the amendment to that article and the removal of the provision for a review.

Razak did not live to honour his promise. His brother-in-law Hussein Onn was kicked out by Mahathir in July 1981.

Mahathir should have ended NEP in 1990, along with the removal of article 153. As an Indian-turned-Malay, and having to declare that he has 100% Malay blood running in his veins, he cared for his continued tenure as PM rather than the good of the nation. His Oscar winning acting with crocodile tears for the hurts he was supposed to have felt for not being able to change the mindset of Malays to forgo crutches was a bluff which he revealed himself in his recent posting. See http://chedet.co.cc/chedetblog...baru.html.

TDM has confirmed that the twin objectives of NEP have been achieved. Yet he took those was wanted discontinuation of NEP to task. For TDM NEP has become a birth right for Malays, and Malays now refer to all 1.4 billion Muslims in the world so long as they come to Malaysia. The NEWMalays would have the status of bumiputras over non-Muslims in the country though some non-Muslims have their ancestors arrived here during the Malacca sultanate.
UMNO have moulded the mindset of Malays to think and dream that it was their birthright to enjoy preferential NEP treatment, forever. UMNO used NEP to justify May 13, and since 1990, they have been using Ketuanan Melayu to justify NEP. Since Islam is the sufficient condition to be classified as Malays, UMNO have made their followers to place the Islamic religion above all others. One of the methods to elevate oneself is to depress others. The cow-head incident was an event to honour Ketuanan Melayu and downgrade the Hindu temple.

The problems facing the countries, be it the double standards adopted by the police, the MACC or even the judiciary are the ramifications of Ketuanan Melayu. The staff of government agencies have internalised the belief that it was their responsibility to ensure Ketuanan Melayu remains, and for that UMNO should remain in power. It is politics and more so the race-based political parties which make the citizens polarised along racial lines. It is the bloated political organizations such as UMNO comprising 2-3 million members, and the way top leaders are â€˜electedâ€™ or arranged that makes corruption in government indestructible.

As for education, if the core values taught in civic classes, or even religious teaching of fairness, equality, authority versus responsibility, efforts and commensurate rewards are not practiced in the society, what goods are education to them?

Yes the education system in the country is a mess. But that is another issue.

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