Don't Blame The Schools!

The air is toxic in our national schools. Not by design surely, but the schools do little to remove the spores of prejudice that the children bring into the schools from their homes. These absent outside influences spread quickly along the sweat-drenched hallways of ugly concrete and colour the minds of the pupils who spend the significant years of their lives trapped within those confines.

It would be unfair to solely lay the blame on the school teachers or its administrators. The teaching staff, overloaded with work as they are, are ill-equipped to stem the torrent of hate that pours every day through the school gates, replenished everyday in living rooms, mamaks, and newspapers. That is, almost, the sole fixation of our race-aware minds – that is we may not feel racists ourselves, but we will find it very difficult to shift our way of thinking from a race-centric point of view. Few things in our lives seem to happen in absolute isolation of the ‘other’, our identity is constructed around what the other person is not. It is not ‘foreign influences’ that are poisoning the minds of our young, it is ourselves, yet we point to schools and blame them for failing to stop our children from thinking the way we have taught them.

What I will argue against here is this reheated paranoia against ‘vernacular’ schools, and how they apparently segregate and pit the races against each other. If by vernacular we mean that a school discriminates to accept only a certain group of people, I could claim to have experienced time in a ‘vernacular’ school, because the school I went to only accepted Muslim students. I hear the opposition against my use of the term, but if the heart of the matter is the absence of students from diverse backgrounds than this particular school fits the bill. Now my experience there, whether you’d like to believe it or not, was markedly non-racial.

We were Malay-Muslim, all of us, but nothing was ever said to us that taught us that we were better than people who were of different backgrounds. The Malaysian education syllabus may not have significantly addressed the issue of race-relations but our dinniyah curriculum certainly did. There no two-ways about it, we were taught, the circumstances of your birth does not make you superior to other; it was the contents of your heart and your actions that mattered to God. Or Allah, if that sits better with you.

Imagine my surprise when I left the musty confines of my small segregated utopia for the harsh sunlight of a Subang Jaya SMK after my PMR. Everything that me and my friends were allowed to ignore in our urban madrasah came crashing back upon us and suddenly we were again first identified as Melayu, before our names, before our selves. Beyond a small cabal of English-speaking kids from priviledged backgrounds (who also happened to be the only group excelling at anything in school), my Sekolah Kebangsaan was strictly carved along linguistic lines: Malay, Cantonese, Tamil.

 Looking back I don’t think there was any malice in us arranging ourselves in that way; I don’t think anyone of my Melayus really hated the Chinese kids in a real way, it was more an extension of the norms we practiced with our families in our neighbourhoods. Then as now, people tended to congregate around areas that they know to be Malay areas or Chinese areas or Indian areas. In this regard, schools and their diverse makeup of races would be the anomaly to the students rather than the opposite.

 The problem is not schools, vernacular or otherwise. I do not claim that my experience in a SAR is representative of other types of segregating schools although I have many friends who went to similar schools who can share similar experiences. Likewise, I certainly don’t think that my SMK nightmare is true for everyone despite the fact that I frequently hear products of our national education system harbour deep suspicion against every person who looks different from themselves.

The problem, in the view of my humble confused self, is that our society keeps perpetuating rancid beliefs that reduce others, and ourselves, into less-than-human beings not worthy of real empathy or respect. The fact that schools have not been equipped to deal with this significantly only compounds the problem further, but even if they did, their efforts would only amount to a small prod against this boulder barreling down upon us from up the hill.

So it’s up to us really, not the schools, or some Jabatan Perpaduan and their Filem Negara PSAs. Shall we bicker and spit at each other over the same things over and over again and suffer the consequences, or are we going to band together to throw away our old beliefs and work collectively towards creating a real national identity?