Just a guy ranting (not me!)
Well, haven’t gotten anything worthwhile to blog lately, till I read this. This was just posted on recom.org. It’s about some guy, John Lee ranting about the M’sian education system (plus he wants to write a book about it too!) The thread is here, and an excerpt from the book is here. It’s 14 pages long and is in PDF format, but it’s humorous enough for me to stay right till the end. He’s only 15 years old, so his daring to write it all down is to be applauded, but he still needs to get a few more lessons in life. So, in a sense, humanity should have lots to thank for as he intends to do political/economic science and not social science! =)
His posts are quite a refreshing change to see for once, somebody trashing our M’sian education system to hell in a sarcastic manner. Ben Lo, if you’re reading this he sounds just like you! I’m pretty sure that some of his comments on the education system resonate deeply with some of you out there. But if you examine his literary work a bit closer, one can see that he has lots more to learn and experience (well, being a 15 year old kid, we shouldn’t be too hard on him right?).
Firstly, he asked his readers which is more influential in altering world history. So which is more influential, the Islamic Caliphates or Renaissance; or the splitting of Sunnis and Shiites compared to the Industrial Revolution? I say it’s a redundant question. Without the powerful Muslim empires, the Europeans would have taken longer to rise up from the Dark Ages, if at all (plus the Renaissance and Reformation may never have occurred the way it had). Besides that, if the splitting of Muslims had never happened, the most powerful capital in the world might still be Baghdad today, and not Washington! So he does need more history lessons. Well, IMHO the sticking point is that History focuses too much on the spiritual development of Islam alone and their great thinkers (too many of them, don’t you think?) and less on the ideas they promote. As a result, we have no concrete idea of why the Middle East is the way it is today. For example, I have yet to understand exactly how the Crusades permanently altered the course of history (watching Kingdom of Heaven and playing Age of Empires II helped a bit, but not much), why the Jews got kicked out of the Middle East, and then Europe, and then back to Israel and off to the US. So, we have a pretty good idea to how Islam started, but not much about the 57 year old question that the West has yet to resolve today; does the State of Israel have the right to exist? Does History teach us how that all came about, to avoid history repeating itself (one of the most important reasons to study History?). No!
Then Mr. Lee calls his peers ‘intelligent’ when they are clearly not. It’s like the Thinking Skills argument; a person shouldn’t be denied a job because he is overqualified, but rather because he is under qualified in some other aspect. So, if his peers are adept at memorising but not good at applying theory to practise, that hardly fulfils the definition of intelligent. They’re just ‘good’ at studies and that’s it.
Then he goes on to a bit of Physics and flops. He mentioned that Einstein challenged Newton’s assumptions, and Newton challenged the assumption that gravity is just there. I assumed that he implied that both challenged assumptions of gravity. Actually, I don’t think that’s quite the case. Both of them recognised gravity’s existence, but yet could not explain how they exist but could describe its effects very well. (The graviton was and still is a hypothetical particle in quantum gravity, so it’s not a concrete idea yet in explaining gravity’s existence.) Newton came up with a way to describe this ‘force acting at a distance’. That’s all. He didn’t challenge anything about gravity; he just came up with a way to describe it. What challenge the assumption that gravity is just there, it’s still there! Absurd. How about Einstein? Oh, he abolished the concept of absolute time and dramatically altered the way we view the Universe by the introduction of spacetime, but did he challenge basic assumptions of gravity? I think not. But he came up with a more accurate way than Newton’s to predict gravity’s influence on other bodies. Gravity is still there, but Einstein just extended humanity’s insight of how gravity affects us and the things around us. But in a way Mr. Lee is correct, although in a way that he may not have intended. Newton believed in the concept of absolute time, but Einstein overthrew the idea and introduced the idea of personal time for everything in the Universe. But still, that is a belief and not an assumption so technically it’s still wrong?
The other thing is that he talked about teachers who discourage ‘intellectual curiosity’ as if they only exist in the M’sian educational system. I dispute that. I had my fair share of those teachers when I was in M’sia and S’pore too. And I felt more restricted in my studies over in S’pore too. Perhaps I have been given too much autonomy by my parents on deciding how to study (they never bother as long as I continue to pull in the As) and I’m more comfortable studying here at home than in a hostel. That brings about my idea that our education should be pursued by our own initiative, and it should encompass as much as possible about the world about us in understanding it. Knowledge is power, and time is precious. And without power, we cannot implement change. It is with that in mind that I pursue knowledge single heartedly. So what about school? It’s just there to help complement and guide your intellectual development, not a one stop source of information nor the sole authority that dictates what we should study. Of course, I am only but a tiny speck in the complex and huge biosphere we live in, so my experience may not be the same as the average student. But I think Mr. Lee needs to recognise that the world isn’t more perfect someplace else in the world, just that it is better in some sense and worse off in some other sense. Oh and yes, our educational system still needs a lot of improvements. The quest to be a developed M’sia is and will be a distant dream without those improvements.
