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?

gunakanlah bahasa kebangsaan kita

The use of good Bahasa, even when it comes naturally to background speakers of the language, can become an act of activism. 

Because it is just strange and odd to not speak like a racist caricature when interacting with different ethnicities, never mind that they sound exactly like you.

Malays in this country seem to still think that they hold sole ownership over anything vaguely Malay: language, dress, religion, land; that, whether they realise it or not, they put down, reduce to their basic prejudice of a race, anyone who they feel is getting too big for their shoes.

Amoi terer you cakap melayu

You kena faham, kami orang Melayu, orang Islam, minum air suam

A paranoia coupled with the delusion that we are the vanguards of Malay culture, 

whose purity we happily protect through neglect.

Meanwhile in Pulau Jawa, books, movies, music in Bahasa are being produced at a rate we dare not imagine.

Islam Di Sumatera Barat

Nukilan ini dikarang tidak lama selepas penulis pulang ke tanahair dari tanah seberang. Perjalanan selama 4 hari ke Bukittingi, Sumatra Barat, Indonesia, meskipun tidak mengisi jiwa tetapi terhasil jua darinya pemerhatian-pemerhatian dan pergolakan-pergolakan baru dalam minda penulis akan realiti Islam di dalam dunia nusantara moden.

Sekian maklum Islam sudah tersebar luas sejak berkurun lagi di Nusantra. Pelbagai artifak yang ditemui dijadikan asas bagi pelbagai teori-teori perkembangannya. Ada yang berpendapat hadirnya Islam di bumi ini hasil usaha para pedagang Arab. Ada pula yang berpendapat dari pedagang Cina yang bertandang. Yang jelas, Islam telah diterima dari strata tertinggi masyarakat Melayu purba sehingga ke rakyat jelata, mengakibatkan berlakunya perubahan identiti masyarakat dari sebuah komuniti berpaksikan adat dan budaya Hindu-Buddha kepada ummat Islam di dalam masa yang singkat.

Pepatah Melayu mengatakan,

Adat bersendi Hukum
Hukum bersendi Kitabullah

Namun, dari pengamatan ringkas penulis, perkara ini tidak semestinya berlaku. Kesan kebudayaan Hindu-Buddha masih terdapat di dalam masyarakat Nusantara hari ini. Malah sesetengah merupakan elemen-elemen yang jelas bertentangan dengan sifat Monotheistik Radikal Islam namun terus diamalkan dari zaman ke zaman.

Penulis pernah ke Jakarta tidak lama dahulu, dan disajikan dengan pelbagai mitos masyarakat yang menebal dengan pengaruh pre-islamik. Malah stuktur masyarakat Jawa (minta dibetulkan sekiranya kurang tepat) terdapat kilasan-kilasan sistem kasta yang membahagi-bahagikan antara insan berbeza status sosio-ekonominya. Keadaannya berbeza sekali di Sumatera Barat. Keunikan dan kelainan struktur Minangkabau mungkin mendorong kita untuk menyangka yang 'fahaman mereka juga menyeleweng' namun realitinya jauh sekali dari hal tersebut. Jika kita di Malaysia, Kota Bharu kita canangkan sebagai Bandaraya Islam, saya bayangkan Kota Padang sebagai Saudara Tua kepadanya yang Islam sudah sebati di dalam fabrik masyarakatnya. Pengzahirannya mungkin berbeza; tiada binaan ala Maghribi atau Mughal, pakaian yang dikenakan kurang ke'arab'an, tetapi ia ibarat inti yang memberi maksud kepada Masyarakat Minang.

Mari kita singkapi kisah Dato' Perpatih. Beliau dikhabarkan merantau ke merata tempat demi mencari ilmu Islam, dan ajarannya hari ini kita kenali sebagai Adat Perpatih. Berlawanan dengan Dato' Temenggung, pengasas adat Temenggung (juga eksport Minangkabau), yang berdiam sahaja di tempatnya. Kesempurnaan ilmu Islam Dato' Perpatih berjaya mewujudkan suatu mekanisme efektif yang melindungi kaum wanita masyarakat Minang dan memastikan lubang kemaksiatan tertutup rapat dengan membela nasib golongan tersebut (sekali lagi, mohon dibetulkan sekira tidak tepat).

Saya sering tertanya-tanya dahulu apabila membaca buku-buku Pak Hamka, bagaimana dia mampu mencipta sebuah masyarakat islam ideal tetapi pada masa yang sama visi yang dihadapkan itu tidak idealistik. Nah, Sumatera Baratlah jawapannya.