Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 1 August 2011 issue)

Dear Kam,
Who do I need to talk to if I want to home-school my children?
Full-on Mum

As far as I know, I don’t think you have to talk to anyone if you want to home-school your children. I might well be wrong but I think nobody will notice if your children don’t ever go to school. All you probably have to do is not send them to school.

I’m not really sure if home schooling is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, you will probably give your children a better education at home than they would get at a local school, but on the other, going to school is about more than just studying. It’s also about a child becoming independent and learning how to interact with other people. You probably can’t teach “people skills”; it’s something children need to find out for themselves. School is also about learning how to deal with authority. I’ve met so many people who first sensed that something was not quite right with the country when they realised that what they were being told at school was utter rubbish.

Perhaps I’m not entitled to venture an opinion because I did not go to school in Malaysia. I went to school in Britain and although I had the best education that money could buy, I still failed all my exams. Somehow I managed to learn how to read and write and I also learnt how to finish the sentence, “I cannot hand in my homework because …” in many exciting and creative ways. I did my A Levels in a tutorial college where classrooms only had five students. If any style of education could have squeezed a result out of me, it should have been this. I took two years to study for my A Levels and I still managed to fail them all, and by very convincing margins.

A couple of years after my time, the college suddenly had lots and lots of Malaysian students and a few weeks ago, the college had an alumni gathering in KL and I attended, despite being probably the worst student in the college’s history. Sitting next to me was a woman who did three A Levels and two S Levels (exams to get into Oxford or Cambridge) in one year. And she got straight As. How on earth is that possible? There must be something good about the Malaysian education system. She went to school in the 1980s, and things have changed since then.

The principal gave a speech at the alumni gathering and told us that over the last 30 years, the college has had 270 Malaysian students. About 44% of them went on to become doctors and 55% of these doctors are still practising medicine in Britain. They never came back. I do not consider this to be “brain drain”. If they found better opportunities and a better life somewhere else, then we should be happy for them. Besides, although some go away forever, many others do come back, even if it’s after a circuitous journey. So look on the bright side. Although Malaysia may have lost over 100 highly trained doctors from my old college, you did get me. Oh dear. I’m really sorry about that.

Dear Kam,
I still can’t believe the terrible news of the killings in Norway. I always thought of Norway as such a sensible country.
In Mourning

Some of you might know that I host a weekly radio show called A Bit of Culture on BFM. My co-host, She Fah Szetu, is part Norwegian and grew up in Norway as well as Sabah. Last week, we talked to a fascinating young Malaysian documentary filmmaker called Ahmad Yazid, who has made several documentaries about Islamist terrorists for the Crime and Investigation network. He spoke very candidly about his brush with extremism when he was growing up and although he rejects their creed, he can understand why they do what they do. He gave a very nuanced guide to what drives them but basically, it is fear and ignorance, wanting to belong to something, and this can all lead to hatred of everyone else. The day after our recording we all heard about the terrible events in Norway.

I must admit that when I first heard about the bombing and shootings in Norway I assumed that it was an Islamist terrorist attack. Instead the killer is Norwegian, but filled with the same hatred of outsiders. He hates immigrants, Muslims and multiculturalism. I’ve never been to Norway but I have been to nearby Denmark, which was trying to come to terms with a new ethnically and culturally diverse society. I met many Malaysians in Denmark, all of whom had assimilated into Danish society while retaining their Malaysianness, as Malaysians usually do. One Malaysian had two daughters who had become local pop stars, one was a coach for the Danish badminton team and one played for the Danish sepak takraw team.

But there were new communities in Denmark (mostly Turkish and Pakistani) that appeared to refuse to absorb anything Danish. The local Danes were perplexed by strange activities like women wearing headscarves or “honour killings”, where a father/brother would murder a daughter/sister for some bizarre reason. For the local Danes, even the most liberal-minded, so many different things all become the same thing: headscarves would inevitably lead to honour killings. Everyone appreciated that the new communities brought good food and shops that opened at useful hours, but neither side appeared to understand the other side.

Despite having a reputation for being sensible and rational, the Norwegian killings were perpetrated by a Norwegian. It is a horrible tragedy but perhaps in its extreme way, it is indicative of a changing Europe.

Dear Kam,
If you have one chance in a lifetime to speak to 50,000 people in a hall, what would you say?
Ted

I don’t know what I would say but I think I’ve had a dream about it. However, in my dream everyone was laughing at me because I was naked. I was also late for my first day at school and all my teeth were falling out. I don’t think it was a happy dream. Speaking to 50,000 people sounds terrifying. Some people might relish the idea of speaking to a big crowd, but most would find the thought terrifying, and that is probably why people hide behind a PowerPoint presentation. There is an expectation that we should all be Steve Jobs: good with the ideas and good with the selling. But not all of us can do both.

Talking to lots of people is terrifying but we should probably all try it at some point. It’s a good skill to have and we should test ourselves all the time. Having said that, I think any organisation could benefit from copying what they do in the British legal system, and to a large extent in Malaysia also. As I understand it, in Britain, a solicitor does all the legal grunt-work, and then hands the case over to a barrister who wears a wig and does the glamorous talking in court. The barrister knows all the tricks and is good at putting on a performance for the judge or jury. Perhaps every organisation should employ somebody to just do the public-speaking stuff. Some people are good at talking, even if they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Reprinted with the kind permission of