"Rempitized" Education System

With the attraction that Mat Rempits are attracting in our local media and politicians today, it was quite interesting when Dr Azly Rahman wrote in his column in Malaysiakini of a "rempitised" education system.

Dr Azly offered a fairly complex definition of "rempitise", and it's application to economic and education systems:

Rempitism (noun; also concept and ideology borrow from the neo-Malay word rempit) - a Malaysian phenomenon in which youth uses the public road system to break the speed limit with customised motorbikes in illegal, past-midnight drag-races that rob the restful sleep of peaceful citizens; a phenomena akin to a capitalist economy of a struggling showcasing Third World nation such a Malaysia that hypermodernises beyond the ability of its people to cope with its sensationalised designs of ‘economic miracles’.

A ‘rempitised’ economic and education system ‘rams’ human beings into different ‘pits’ (hence the term ‘rempit’) of the conveyer belt of the capitalist production system; creating what looks like a natural progression of meritocracy in education and social evolution. The foundation of this system is neo-colonialism, structural violence and the alienation of labour.

I wouldn't claim to fully comprehend the above definitions, so I'll provide my own lay man understanding of it. We currently have a declining and clearly inadequate education system at all levels from primary to tertiary levels, as demonstrated by the illiteracy levels as well as the poor performance of our universities in all global rankings. At the same time, for the purposes of political expediency, akin to the egos of the Mat Rempits, we would still like to be seen as "world class". Hence, to rempitise our education system is akin to the haphazard attempts to adopt modern and progressive-like Wesern attributes in a almost reckless manner, without fully contemplating the consequences for themselves, the public and the country's future.

What however, I thought was an extremely key question asked was "Do we have people in the education ministry well versed enough in analysing the phenomenon of our rempitised economy (speeding it up illegally) and how this is directly related to how we are ‘schooling’ our society?"

...how do we deal with the leadership of the public education system? We need to start by selecting only those who are well-versed in the entire spectrum of education.

We have ministers, educational experts, specialists and educational representatives who either have minimal classroom experience or none at all - let alone have much-needed knowledge in the history, theory, post-structurality and possibilities of education.

We place them in this ministry based on political considerations. They mess things up and show their inability to understand where our youth are heading, or how to design an education system good enough to reflect the dream we have - a dream of a just, equitable, environmentally sustainable, intellectual and ethical society.

We are more concerned with having our students and teachers pledge blind loyalty to the signs and symbols of power; one-dimensional thinking; and politically correct behaviour instead of developing, celebrating and further grooming good teachers who can radicalise the minds of the youth of tomorrow... We do this against the backdrop of our speeded-up, hypermodernised economy - one we rempitised in the name of the New Economic Policy.

The question for us now is: how do we de-rempitise our society?

How do we do that indeed.