Kam Raslan’s Talking Edge

(Reprinted from The Edge – Options pullout, 29 May 2017 issue)

Hi Kam,
I want my son to have a decent education but he says that I didn’t have an education and I turned out okay. How do I argue with that logic?

As you probably know by now, a senior Universiti Utara Malaysia lecturer filed a police report to accuse the Speaker of the Selangor State Assembly of trying to “Christianise” Malaysia through a book she had written. In the book (which I have not read), she apparently talked about how her faith has been important to her. According to news reports, the lecturer claimed in his police report that the book had “too many stories and quotations from the Bible” and that “the stories can influence readers, including myself, to feel admiration for the greatness of Hannah Yeoh’s God”. Hmmm. Surely, if there were any justification or credence to that logic then it would destroy at a single stroke the very foundation of Malaysia’s pluralism. Malaysia would cease to be Malaysia.

What is an education? If somebody has impressive academic qualifications, then they must be right, right? Having failed every exam I ever took apart from my driving test, I am not automatically impressed by academic qualifications but I absolutely respect the institution. I certainly don’t want to be operated on by a “doctor” who feels that slicing me open with a rusty penknife is the right thing to do for my headache. I want to know he has had a proper education and then I’ll let him do whatever he wants.

Because I didn’t go to university, I have both a romantic and sceptical view of education. I’d like to think that if I had gone to university I would have been thrilled by the exposure to new ideas, that my consciousness would have been expanded and that after only a few short years I would have emerged as a wiser and more mature person, ready to take on a world in which there might not be any obvious right or wrong answers. But I think I would have been overwhelmed by the need to complete set tasks, where the examiners are expecting to see a predetermined right answer laid out in the predetermined right way. At its best, an education is a mind-expanding and maturing experience but at its worst, it can teach that conformity and obedience will always be rewarded.

As a person who did not receive a tertiary education I might be prejudiced but I am concerned that a potential danger lies at its heart. My concern is that education can be perceived to be some sort of objective science, that it will discover the best and the brightest, that it can impart fundamental truths to young minds. But exams are set by people who are expecting right answers. And what do they hold to be true in their hearts?

Hi Kam,
I always tell my son to be careful what he says on the internet because the internet never forgets. And then he clears my search history. He’s a good son.

In the US recently, a student from China gave a graduation speech at her university where she drew a parallel with the polluted air of China to praise America’s “fresh air of democracy”. She said about her arrival in the US: “The moment I inhaled and exhaled outside the airport, I felt free.” Furthermore, she said in her graduation speech, “I would soon feel another kind of fresh air for which I will be forever grateful. The fresh air of free speech. Democracy and free speech should not be taken for granted. Democracy and freedom are the fresh air that is worth fighting for”.

Obviously, her American audience loved it, but the video of her speech was posted on YouTube and in no time at all posts about the subject had been viewed 50 million times on China’s social media. And the reaction was almost entirely negative. Even the People’s Daily newspaper weighed in to accuse her of making a “biased” speech. In the face of this enormous backlash in her homeland, the young Chinese student immediately posted a video apology: “I apologise and sincerely hope everyone can forgive me. I have learned my lesson.”

What is the lesson? One sad lesson might be that in the internet age there is no longer any such thing as a private comment. This young student understandably thought that she was simply making a speech to her fellow students but the video was made available to the world, which includes her native China. Hundreds of graduation speeches are made every year and this speech should have passed as a happy occasion in one young person’s life and as an infinitesimally tiny and anonymous moment for the rest of the world. Unfortunately, the internet allowed it to be seized upon as a crushing example. It must be utterly terrifying for a young person on the very brink of starting a life to wake up one day and discover that her entire nation has not only heard of her but has turned against her, especially when that nation is as massive as China. Would she have made the speech if she had known about the backlash she was going to receive? Probably not. Fear would probably have stopped her from praising the virtues of free speech, but would she have stopped believing in its values?

Another lesson might be, don’t worry too much. The internet churns through stories at an astonishingly rapid speed. Who can remember what the Harlem Shake or the Ice Bucket Challenge was about? I can’t even remember the tune to Gangnam Style.

Reprinted with the kind permission of