How Malaysia can cash in on Trump's war on education

Free Malaysia Today

2 days ago

It's tiring to moan about the state of education in Malaysia, rehashing the same old complaints again and again. It feels like being stuck forever in a remedial class, while the rest of the world zooms ahead in the express classes. It sucks.
Much of the world is indeed zooming ahead, except for those parts of the world where education is merely training you to do something useful – fixing the plumbing or even building atomic bombs – but not to think critically about things. In that group we can add a new country, one you wouldn't have guessed a year ago.
It's the USA. Now nobody will deny that the US has one of the best education systems in the world. The proof is their decades-long position as the richest and most powerful country on earth. Their education system is certainly a key enabler of that achievement.
But that position is under serious attack, and if the attacks are successful, the changes will set the US back for decades, from which there may not be any recovery at all.
What has this got to do with Malaysia? Well, for one, some of the causes are the same. In one particular instance, its ideology is driven by an increasingly conservative religious agenda. Another is the impact of capitalism on education.
Donald Trump's second presidency, a mere few months old, has thrown up huge upheavals in the US education system. The secular nature of US society is increasingly under attack from the religious conservatives – mostly the evangelical Christian Nationalists as they're now called – who see their faith coming under attack and hence justifying a counter attack of their own.
Given that much of the US education system is managed locally at state or even district and city level, a lot of these changes have been happening under the radar for quite a while. It's only lately that they're becoming more apparent.
In the more conservative US states, school administrators are increasingly challenging the traditional secular American education system. They're pushing the church increasingly into the classroom, ostensibly against the 'woke' agenda, such as science and liberal values.
This is exactly what many of our own conservative Islamic leaders are doing. Oue government schools are looking more and more like religious schools, with the old hopes of education creating unity among the Malaysian races increasingly disappearing.
These hopes are under attack from a pincer movement. On one hand, we have the rise of private Islamic schools, some supposedly following the national curricula, while some do not even bother at all. On the other hand, the government education system itself is becoming more and more like a religious school system.
Nothing good can come out of this. As in the US and also in Malaysia, education is being targeted by the religious conservatives because dumbing down the populace is the surest way of controlling them. The less the people practise critical thinking, the more amenable they are to being led by the nose.
It's a recipe that has been tried before, in totalitarian environments whether of the far right or far left, religious or secular. In no case has it proven beneficial to society at large, regardless of how profitable they were to the small core of leaders pushing them.
Trump is now targeting Harvard, the oldest university in the US and one of the best in the world and exerting pressure by targeting Harvard's foreign students, who form a sizable portion of the student population.
Right now, unless the US courts block him, he'll be able to ban Harvard from enrolling foreign students. That will be the end of Harvard's position as the world's pre-eminent university. Its billions of dollars in endowments won't be able to stop Harvard from losing staff, students and its attractiveness.
A friend who's a professor at a US university regularly ranked higher than even Harvard says the quality of a university ultimately depends on the quality of the students. Sure, the faculty matters, facilities matter, the curriculum matters, but it's the students that make a university excellent.
This may sound a bit strange to us Malaysians, for whom education is often about the 'university' (which often means the faculty and staff and ministries) spoon-feeding the students. They almost don't seem to matter: they merely need to turn up, memorise everything and regurgitate them during exams and hey presto: they're now educated!
Anyway, Trump has his own agenda, which is to emasculate the group of Americans who don't support him, such as those with university education. Harvard becomes the whipping boy – win against Harvard, and everything else becomes easier.
There are many more chapters yet to be written about this sorry episode. I don't really care about what happens there. We in the rest of the world are being given a chance in a century to catch up and perhaps even leapfrog over an old established power.
We should grab the chance with both hands. Who would've thought the US would implode by its own hand in such a spectacular fashion? Not us, and likely not even their worst enemies.
Luckily for us in Malaysia, our 'Trumpian' crowd – the conservative Islamic lot – are the slowly evolving kind rather than quickly revolting type, like their American counterparts! We still have the time to improve our own education system and avoid what the Americans seem bent on doing.
If you look out far enough, you'd see that apart from a few nations – including our neighbours down south whose name I won't mention as it may get to their head and increase their sound level – not many are getting their act together on education.
Many of the old western 'gold standards' in education are in turmoil themselves, benefitting some of their competitors such as China.
We're still in the fight. Most Malaysians still care about education and see it as the best chance for a better life. Our muddling along with our education system over the last few decades hasn't hurt us beyond repair.
While the primary beneficiaries of the US's misadventure will be the Cambridge, Oxford and Tsinghua universities of the world, we too can take advantage of things to raise the quality of our education system.
Remember, in this race to be ahead of our many national competitors, we don't have to be perfect – we just need to be better than most of them. Nobody is totally happy with what they have, though lately many have even more reasons to be unhappy with how things are unfolding.
Our political leaders need to understand that if we don't have a good education system for our young, the future will be bleak. If any proof is needed, the US is giving them one in real time.
Regardless of who wins in this fight over Harvard, permanent damage has been done to the long term attractiveness of the US education system.
This means many of the best faculty, and especially the best students, whether originating from the rest of the world or even from within the US, will realise there are many other better educational options elsewhere.
Malaysia should try to profit from this. However, one of the enablers for us to do it – capitalism in education – has its own toxic downsides too, and we'll discuss them soon.
As for now, I forthwith withdraw my application to join Harvard. Don't even bother to send me a rejection letter. They can hire as many Americans as they want for that position of janitor that I applied for. I'm done with Harvard.
The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.