And they say teachers educate....

Many schools have gone on a donation drive for the Gaza cause... I see nothing wrong in it really except the rhetorics that seem to go with it during school assemblies. Teachers who try to champion this cause also seem to use this as a platform to give their often times skewed version.... and usually they are lined with racial and religious undertones tailored to a certain prescribed sway....

But the thing which annoys me is the way we teachers rant and rave in those rhetorics and semantics, often sounding like politicians out to win votes and in the process creating bias in the minds of our young.... indoctrinating the minds of the young; I call it poisoning. Sounded to me like we're out to recruit 'followers'. I feel ashamed sometimes that we have allowed ourselves to regress to that level. Teachers should educate and teach the young to reason, not indoctrinate them with their own views.

In one particular school, the speech got sesat to the issue of Ketuanan Melayu.... and how the non-Malay students should be grateful that the school had allocated a percentage of the places for them. What link between that and the Palestinian issue, I wonder? Ketuanan Palestine??? Whatever happened to fair and principled values??? You mean to say that when God created all the different people, He left instructions that Chinese only live in this land call China, Indians only in India, Malays in the Archipelago??? Crazy, right? It's like saying if you are born in Alor Star, then you can only live in Alor Star.... if you go by that flow of thought... The smallness of our minds, sometimes.

If they have to make the children see.... let the kids understand why the Jews and the Palestinians are warring? The role of HAMAS, the Jewish stand.... the sufferings of the Gazans..... give the facts, let the children see.... an interesting write-up here.. and let them come to their conclusion and learn from it..

Well, anyway, that's the state we are in.....fragmented as a nation, sometimes I think, by conscious choice of our political masters. In many activities in national schools these days, there is a clear separation of the different races, and most activities these days have religious undertones... it has become the norm rather than the exception in national schools. How can we expect the different races to come together if we continue to consciously separate them at school?

I think it's okay to have religious activities... but if we are to carry them out, I think a good idea would be to integrate all the different races, give each group the freedom to practise their faith.... make it a learning experience for everyone... educate to integrate, not educate to divide. Perhaps then, we stand a chance of creating a truly Malaysian identity.

And perhaps too then, we can bring forth a generation of fair minded Malaysians. Right now, we have too many 'wrong' people in every nook and corner of the civil service... who seems to have their own little agendas... the little Napoleans. And the teaching profession is also saddled with these little Napoleans...