Malaysians are fond of viewing things from a skewed prismatic vision that refracts truth into various prejudicial conundrums.
They have a bone to pick on every life issue be it political, economic, religious, education, just name it.
And these responses — prejudicial and chauvinistic manifestations — always find conspiracies in anything and everything they do not like. And they usually overreact without knowing the full facts, especially when it appeals to their emotions.
It is not incorrect to say that Malaysians are quite a gullible lot. Most of the time they expect others to do the thinking for them while they indulge in irrational critical appraisals as long it meets their skewed perceptions of the incidents or issues.
Take education as an example. A sizeable part of the Malaysians citizenry, including politicians with vested interests, has a prejudicial attitude towards our education system. There is general condemnation of our national schools as being inferior to the vernacular streams, which are overrated.
In fact, there are strengths and weaknesses in both the national and vernacular schools with regard to curricular and experiential education. As long as we maintain this perceived superiority and inferiority complex, we are condemning ourselves to a dystopic mentality that promotes cerebral aggression and angst.
What better way to vent the perceived frustration than to attack the authorities and in this case the education minister. He has been blamed for almost everything that is wrong with the education system but they conveniently forget that he is burdened with historical baggage of our making, both the sectarian leaders and the general public who supported them.
Before, the authorities could focus all resources in a single-stream urban English-medium education with a uniform educative process, such as the Senior Cambridge and Higher School Certificate Examinations. However, rural Malay-medium schools lacked almost all the basic facilities.
After Merdeka, emphasis was given to national schools with Malay as the medium of instruction, which is a logical means of integrating students towards national unity. However, proponents of mother tongue-medium schools (vernacular schools) insisted on having a separate stream that caused the polarisation of not only schoolchildren but also the workforce.
Such a move was to ensure the continued survival of identity politics. These people ignored and looked condescendingly at the national language and the national schools but heaped praise on vernacular ones in the name of the importance of the mother tongue. This negates the effort at building an integrated and cohesive society.
They know the cause of the problems yet they deny it. They want things to change for the better yet they refrain from contributing towards achieving the change.
Changes require a structural realignment to optimise efforts and resources to coalesce them into a synergistic whole. Yet they are reluctant to effect the realignment.
It is rather selfish to want change and at the same time maintain the status quo. It is like eating a cake and keeping it at the same time.
To really effect change, they must be willing to forgo certain positions and mental attitude and embrace a paradigm shift that would emplace a new algorithm. Thus, to change our educational system, there is a need to merge the various streams into a single one with a bilingual medium of instruction of Malay and English with provisions for mother-tongue languages.
There is a need to rectify the uneven physical and human teaching facilities between rural and urban areas and to implement programmes to aid those handicapped by the lack or absence of a nourishing educational ecosystem, especially in the rural areas of Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak.
Rural children and their parents regard education as being confined only to school hours while urban children experience both formal and informal learning not only in schools but also at home and tuition classes.
Urban parents are totally involved in their children’s education while the rural ones need their children to help them eke out a living. There is a need to expose and change the attitude of rural and semi-rural children towards the process of learning through a dedicated educational programme such as the matriculation programme. This programme does not in any way deny non-Malays of educational opportunities as there are other government and private educational avenues to cater for a variety of interests.
There must be a political will to address these discrepancies and to look at the seeming imbalances from the nation-building standpoint of social reengineering.
These imbalances affect both sides but vested parties are quick to condemn the authorities as the progenitor and having a racially biased deportment.
However, these same parties covertly engage in prejudicial and chauvinistic practices in politics, education and employment. They create the impression of being aggrieved parties and that they are kosher and the government is not.
For the sake of the future of this country we need to understand the reality of the situation and that all of us are part of the problem and we can provide the solution; it is no longer tenable to sustain a state of denial. The time for pushing the dirt under the carpet is over and we need to grasp the bull by the horn and move on.
The writer is an emeritus professor at the Centre for Policy Research and International Studies, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang