Either ignored or plainly blindsided by her educational policymakers, multiculturalism and the infusion of the practices of multicultural education is absent, even though it is clear that politics and education cannot be taken as separate disciplines in order to understand the nature and future of national development.
Malaysias survival as a nation depends primarily on the re-crafting of an education system philosophically, systemically, and pedagogically sound enough to bridge the gaps between the socio-economic and cultural deficiencies brought about by the legacy of Mahathirism; one based on the use of race ideology to sustain control and to design hegemony of the Malay-Muslim race.
Education as the only means for personal, social, cultural, and even spiritual and ecumenical progress can only be achieved if one goes back to the its philosophical foundations and re-look at the conception of human nature itself.
In Malaysia, a legacy of British colonial policy and its tool of social reproduction, i.e. schooling, has paved the way for Malaysias neo-colonialist strategy of a hidden system of apartheid, to ensure that the races are still separated in an unequal way.
Issues and institutions in such a scenario reflect the ideology of dominance - of one race over others or the rest - blinding educationalists and policy-makers to see beyond race and religion in making sure that the gentle profession and humanistic enterprise called education is driven fundamentally by the almost ideologically-bankrupt United Malays National Organisations (Umnos) idea of education and nation-building.
Pre-schools, primary schools, secondary schools and even universities take the nature of racial educational exclusivity.
Shinning examples of this apartheid-isation of education are any all-racial schools, Mara Junior Science Colleges, and the Universiti Teknologi Mara system - all these in addition to the already apartheid-ised Malaysian Civil Service, albeit de facto in nature, whose existence is shackled by the ideology of an endangered ruling class of Malay-dominated politicians, in all its ignorance of the meaning of education, claimed superior knowledge to what that enterprise solely means.
New breed of educational policymakers needed
Malaysia needs not only a new educational direction, detouring from the road of further apartheid-isation of education it is happily traversing but also a new breed of cosmopolitanistic-thinking educational policymakers and practitioners.
Beyond these, Malaysia needs most logically a regime change in toto - to allow a new political will to an educational hope for the nation; anything short of these, will bring Malaysia to a pariah or a failed state educationally and economically in an increasingly predatorily globalised state. What then must Malaysians do?
Read more:
Dismantle our apartheid education system
Recommendation and review posted by G. Smith
