Revised Ethnic Dis-relations Module for Malaysian Universities.

My goodness. When I read the news about it this morning, I just felt shock and anger. As I had previously blogged about before, this new course that the government is trying to introduce into local universities, is a good idea with a horrible implementation. The idea is to foster integration by encouraging healthy debate on ethnic issues at the tertiery level. However, if implemented badly, it will only spell disaster by promoting ethnic dis-integration.

The original draft provoked massive protests from various parties as many viewed the historical 'facts' as biased. This view was expressed by cabinet members on both sides as well as historical scholars. Now, the new draft is out and has made several changes: (1) removal of Suqiu appeals and the Kampung Medan incident (2) Removal of historial errors of Sabah and Sarawak (3) Presentation of May 13, 1969 without any reference to political parties (4) More information on the contributions of other races in the fight for independence.

Let me put my opinion this way. Removal of 'controversial' issues from the module has just made it a lame duck. There is only going to be open debate and discussion *if* there is openness in the admission of 'facts'. So, now instead of discussing say the racial riots in an open manner, we're just going to skim through that chapter. This merely shows that the government has taken the biased stance as the official stance. So, instead of revising it's stance in the face of massive criticism, which is incidentally based on historical 'facts' as well, the government has chosen to defuse the topic by simply ignoring it. This is the "i dunno" government for you.

This either means that the government is so immature that it cannot accept criticism, or that it doesn't feel that the university students are mature enough to handle the controversy. If it's the former, then, I seriously question their whole objective in introducing this module and I feel that it's fairly obvious that they *have* a hidden agenda. If it's the latter, then I think that the government doesn't understand it's own youth well enough and thinks that they're generally to stupid to know what's good for them.

So, this has just turned into another pointless brainwashing sejarah class for undergraduates. This is entirely laughable. We've already been pumped with official historical 'facts' for all of our secondary school life. There really isn't any real reason to continue pumping us with the same historical 'facts'. If they are not going to address the gaps in the official history, then, why bother. Discussions of this nature invariably remind me of my Malaysian Studies lecturer, Dr Mohammed Halib. In his first lecture of the year, he would remind us strongly about the dangers of plagiarism and tell us to *forget* all the historical 'facts' that we've been pumped with during secondary school. I certainly hope that he still does that with his present students. I stayed awake in ALL his lectures, and took ALL his modules.

The present government just *never* ceases to amaze me.