The essence of a nation-building or state-building model is best perceived through its education policies. This is after all the key area within which the government strategises its own survival.
For the rest of us, only by comprehending the underlying motives behind a series of political actions can we judge whether a project over time can be said to have succeeded or not. Simply put, the efficacy of an act depends on what the ambition with that act really is.
In Malaysia, ethnocentric pathos more than professional training or intellectual concerns cleared the bewildering path that generations of schoolchildren have had to traverse. If one accepts that to be the case, then the country’s education system would appear to have succeeded better than if we mistook its motives to have been educational ones.
Parents and schoolchildren may feel badly done by, of course, but that is another discussion.
The main articles in this issue of Penang Monthly are meant to stimulate new thinking about education and schooling for future generations of Malaysians, and debate about what novel options are available today. It is already 2016 after all. The Internet is here; information free flow is a fact of life no matter what the authorities tell us.
