Malaysian education is too Western-centric, ignorance of Asian values, etc!

A Merdeka of the mind

Our education is too Western-centric, aping Western universities and showing ignorance of Asian and African contributions to knowledge.

AS we celebrate 55 years of political independence, we may note the blessings of peace and prosperity in our beloved land. But we also need to reflect on some unfulfilled dimensions of independence.

If independence is autonomy or freedom from the control of another nation, then we Malaysians are hardly free.

The basic assumptions of our political, economic and educational systems are dictated by Western, especially Anglo-American, hegemony. Politically we are free but enslavement of the mind has hardly ceased.

A slave mentality or Western/Euro-centrism need not be a conscious option. It is rooted in our psychology of dependence on, and blind reverence for, everything Western.

Syed Hussein Alatas calls it “the captive mind”. For Ward Churchill, modern intellectual discourse and higher education are “White Studies”.

Hundreds of years ago, the coloniser seized not only land but minds, monopolising information sources and undermining indigenous know­ledge.

For Frantz Fanon, the colonised was “elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s cultural standards”.

Ngugi wa Thiong says “it is the final triumph of a system of domination, when the dominated start singing its virtues”.

So 55 years after independence, our public figures are still enamoured with the colonial tune. Their intellectual discourses have three tendencies.

First, the Western worldview and its assumptions are blindly aped. Second, we are ignorant of Asian and African roots of knowledge and Eastern contributions to civilisation. Third, there is hardly any critique of Western theories in the light of our own realities.

Take Western-centrism in our educational institutions. Yusef Progler finds that in whatever field of study, a course in most Asian and African universities follows a similar path.

“It will first identify the great white European or American men of each discipline and then drill their theories and practices as if these were universal”, while ignoring knowledge from other civilisations.

Government recognition of foreign degrees is skewed in favour of Anglo-American awards. Eminent citadels of learning in Asia and Africa are largely ignored.

The favoured destination for JPA-sponsored postgraduate scholars is Europe or the United States. The external examiners and visiting professors are mostly from Britain, the US or Australia. Asian scholars are generally excluded from such honours or offered lesser terms.

Intellectual grovelling before Western experts remains as deeply ingrained as during the British Raj. A few years ago, Cherie Blair was invited to lead the arguments in a case before our courts even when scores of eminent local lawyers were available.

In any prestigious lecture series, the guest of honour is invariably a Westerner, sometimes of dubious credentials. For example, Tony Blair was invited by a local NGO to deliver a lecture.

But when Mugabe and Bashar were scheduled to come, concern was expressed, and rightly so. The crimes of Western leaders may be ignored, but we jump up to take a principled stand against Asian and African miscreants.

Our legal system remains British-oriented. In the English fashion of Austinian positivism, the concept of law is tied to the commands of the political sovereign even though most Asians and Africans regard religion and custom as part of the seamless web of the law.

The Civil Law Act continues its worship of outdated British precedents even though we have greater affinity with many other constitutional systems like India’s.

The Legal Profession Act continues to permit British graduates to be called to the Malaysian Bar without undergoing a bridging course. A key component of the course should be a study of the Malaysian Consti­tution.

In our law faculties, legal education is as much a colonial construct as during the Raj. The course structure and content, the book list and the icons are mostly Western.

A typical course on jurisprudence in Malaysia often begins with Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Bentham, Pound, Weber, Ehrlich, Durkheim, Marx, etc.

The Mahabharata, the Arthashastra, the Book of Mencius, the Analects of Confucius and the treatises of Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Jose Rizal, Benoy Kumar Sarkar, Yanagita Kunio and Naquib al-Attas are not included.

Chinese, Indian and Persian universities predated European ones and provided paradigms for early Western education. Yet our universities ignore centuries of enlightenment in China, India, Japan, Persia and West Asia.

It is as if all things good and wholesome originated with Western civilisation and the East was, and is, an intellectual desert. The truth is other­wise.

In science, Galileo, Newton and Einstein illuminated the firmament but not much is known about Al-hazen and Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. Western chemistry was preceded by Eastern alchemy, algebra had African roots.

The philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Sartre and Goethe can be matched by Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Mulla Sadra, Shenhui, al-Mutanabbi and Kalidasa. Durkheim’s and Weber’s sociology must compete with Ibn Khaldun’s.

Freudian psychology had its corrective in Buddhist wisdom. The Cartesian medical model has its Eastern counterpart in ayurvedic, unani and herbal methods.

Very few know that Arab Muslims were central to the making of medieval Europe.

A slavish mimicking of Western norms of government, law and economics prevents us from tackling our own problems like poverty and unsustainable development.

Our attitude leaves us vulnerable to many predatory policies of Western-dominated institutions and processes. Transnational corporations dominate our economies.

Many Asian and African nations choke under the debt stranglehold. The West can bring down our economies with currency speculation, hedge funds, piracy of indigenous resources and trade boycotts as new forms of tyranny.

Yet we are too scared or ashamed to express our own views. Basing our life on other nations’ opinions is slavery.

As Aug 31 approaches, we must resolve to free our minds from Western intellectual hegemony. A Merdeka of the mind will put us on the path to that.

Comment
Prof Shad Saleem Faruqi
> The author wishes all readers Salam Lebaran and Salam Kemerdekaan.

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I Recognise You! But How Did I Do It? How local Chinese see faces?

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 13, 2012) — Are you someone who easily recognises everyone you've ever met? Or maybe you struggle, even with familiar faces? It is already known that we are better at recognising faces from our own race but researchers have only recently questioned how we assimilate the information we use to recognise people.

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New research by the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus has shown that when it comes to recognising people the Malaysian Chinese have adapted their facial recognition techniques to cope with living in a multicultural environment.

The study 'You Look Familiar: How Malaysian Chinese Recognise Faces' was led by Chrystalle B.Y. Tan, a PhD student at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus. The results have been published online in the scientific journal PLoS One, This research is the first PhD student publication for Nottingham's School of Psychology in Malaysia.

Chrystalle Tan said: "Our research has shown that Malaysian Chinese adopt a unique looking pattern which differed from both Westerners and Mainland Chinese, possibly due to the multicultural nature of the country."

The ability to recognise different faces may have social and evolutionary advantages. Human faces provide vital information about a person's identity and characteristics such as gender, age, health and attractiveness. Although we all have the same basic features we have our own distinguishing features and there is evidence that the brain has a specialised mental module dedicated to face processing.



Recognition techniques

Previous research by a group at Glasgow University in Scotland showed that Asians from mainland China use more holistic recognition techniques to recognise faces than Westerners.

• Chinese focus on the centre of the face in the nose area
• Westerners focus on a triangular area between the eyes and mouth
• British born Chinese use both techniques fixating predominantly around either the eyes and mouth, or the nose

Chrystalle said: "The traditional view is that people recognise faces by looking in turn at each eye and then the mouth. This previous research showed us that some Asian groups actually focus on the centre of the face, in the nose area. While Westerners are learning what each separate part of the face looks like -- a strategy that could be useful in populations where hair and eye colour vary dramatically, mainland Chinese use a more global strategy, using information about how the features are arranged. Meanwhile British born Chinese use a mixture of both techniques suggesting an increased familiarity with other-race faces which enhances their recognition abilities."

Eye tracking technology

The study by the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus set out to investigate whether exposure and familiarity with other cultures affects our recognition accuracy and eye movement strategies.

The team used specialised eye tracking technology to investigate the visual strategies used to recognise photographs of faces. They recruited 22 Malaysian Chinese student volunteers from across Nottingham's Malaysia campus. The results showed that Malaysian Chinese used a unique mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth.

Chrystalle said: "We have shown that Malaysian Chinese adopt a unique looking pattern which differed from both Westerners and mainland Chinese. This combination of Eastern and Western looking patterns proved advantageous for Malaysian Chinese to accurately recognise Chinese and Caucasian faces."

The study was supervised by Dr Ian Stephen, an expert on face processing and Dr Elizabeth Sheppard, an expert in eye tracking. Dr Stephen said: "We think that people learn how to recognise faces from the faces that they encounter. Although Malaysia is an East Asian country its ethnic composition is highly diverse. The intermediate looking strategy that Malaysian Chinese use allows them to recognise Western faces just as well as Asians."

How local Chinese see faces?

A study shows that Malaysian Chinese have their own distinct way of identifying faces compared to Caucasians and those from mainland China.

NEW research by the University of Nottingham Malaysia Campus has shown that when it comes to recognising people, the Malaysian Chinese have adapted their facial recognition techniques to cope with living in a multicultural environment.

The study was led by Chrystalle B.Y. Tan, a PhD student at the Nottingham Malaysia campus.

The results have been published online in the scientific journal PloS One. This research is the first PhD student publication for Nottingham’s School of Psychology in Malaysia.

The study had established that we were already better at recognising faces from our own race. However, researchers had only recently questioned how we assimilated such information to recognise people.

The images (from left) show locations where Malaysian Chinese participants focus on when recognising faces; in contrast the Caucasians focus on the eyes and mouth, while the emphasis for Mainland Chinese and Japanese is around the nose.

 

“Our research has shown that Malaysian Chinese adopt a unique looking pattern which differed from both Westerners and Mainland Chinese, possibly due to the multicultural nature of the country,” says Tan.

The ability to recognise different faces may have social and evolutionary advantages.

Human faces provide vital information about a person’s identity and characteristics such as gender, age, health and attractiveness. Although we all have the same basic features we also have other distinguishing features, and there is evidence that the brain has a specialised mental module dedicated to face processing.

Previous research by a group at Glasgow University in Scotland showed that Asians from mainland China use more holistic recognition techniques to recognise faces compared to Westerners.

“The traditional view is that people recognise faces by looking at each eye and then the mouth. This previous research showed us that some Asian groups actually focus on the centre of the face, around the nose area.

“While Westerners are learning what each separate part of the face looks like — a strategy that could be useful in populations where hair and eye colour vary dramatically, mainland Chinese use a more global strategy, using information about how the features are arranged.

“Meanwhile British-born Chinese use a mixture of both techniques suggesting an increased familiarity with the faces of other races which in turn enhances their recognition abilities,” Tan explains.

The study by the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham Malaysia campus sets out to investigate whether exposure and familiarity with other cultures affect our recognition accuracy and eye movement strategies.

The team adopted specialised eye-tracking technology to investigate the visual strategies used to recognise photographs of faces.

They recruited 22 Malaysian Chinese student volunteers from across the Nottingham Malaysia campus. The results showed that Malaysian Chinese used a unique mixed strategy by focusing on the eyes and nose more than the mouth.

“We have shown that Malaysian Chinese adopt a unique looking pattern which differed from both Westerners and mainland Chinese. This combination of Eastern and Western looking patterns proved advantageous for Malaysian Chinese to accurately recognise Chinese and Caucasian faces,” Tan adds.

The study was supervised by Dr. Ian Stephen, an expert on face processing and Dr. Elizabeth Sheppard, an expert in eye-tracking. They are both Assistant Professors at the School of Psychology at the university. “We think that people learn how to recognise faces from the faces that they usually encounter. Although Malaysia is an East Asian country its ethnic composition is highly diverse. The intermediate looking strategy that Malaysian Chinese use allows them to recognise Western faces just as well as Asians,” says Dr. Stephen.

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I Recognise You! But How Did I Do It? How local Chinese see faces?

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The decline of the West

Cover via Amazon

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Ceritalah by KARIM RASLAN

These worries are further fuelled by the ongoing global financial crisis and political paralysis that’s slowly undermining both the European Union and the United States.

HISTORY is written by the victors. Losers rarely get much coverage let alone a mention.
In Malaysia, unlike in Indonesia, the forces of political conservatism ultimately won power from our former colonial masters.

As such, the “left” – as PAS deputy president Mat Sabu discovered – has been forgotten, if not vilified outright.

However, interpretations of history change from decade to decade. Indeed, there is no one “history”.
Instead, there are many and generally, it’s the powerful that get to determine whose version of events should dominate.

What happens though when a once all-powerful nation begins to falter? How does it write or rewrite its history?

Such a shift can be seen in the recent explosion of writing on the supposed decline of Western – particularly American – power.

Historian Niall Ferguson has charted the process in Civilisation: The West and the Rest. Ferguson argues that the “West” (particularly Britain and America) was able to surpass others (such as the Chinese and Ottoman Empires) due to six “killer applications”: competition, science, property rights, medicine, the consumer society and work ethic.



Ferguson argues that the West perfected all six simultaneously, whereas “the Rest” developed only a handful or else let their comparative advantages in these fields stagnate.

His main thrust, however, is that the West’s current weakness stems from a loss of faith in its own civilisational values. In short, the West has failed to renew its commitment to its “killer apps”.

The West, therefore, ought to “recognise the superiority” of its own civilisation because it offers societies “the best available set of economic, social and political institutions”.

One may of course disagree with Ferguson’s thesis but his arguments are compelling.

His contention that the Islamic world declined because it closed its minds and borders is certainly persuasive, if unoriginal.

At the same time, Ferguson’s tome is a clear sign that there’s a growing trend amongst writers discussing (if not agonising) over the West’s “decline”.

These worries are further fuelled by the ongoing global financial crisis and political paralysis that’s slowly undermining both the European Union and the United States.

Indeed, the latest issue of the literary journal New Yorker includes a superb essay by Adam Gopnick, which claims that “declinism” has now morphed into a veritable literary genre – a pet topic for academics and pundits alike.

But is this really something new? “Cassandras” (named after the Trojan princess who foresaw her own city’s destruction at the hands of the Greeks) – the harbingers of doom and decline – have long been with us, even in times of great prosperity.

Indeed, according to Gopnick, the phrase “decline of the West” was used as early as 1918 by the German historian Oswald Spengler.

Nor were such fears of decay exclusively Western: writers and historians such as Ibn Khaldun, Tun Sri Lanang and Sima Qian have dwelt on similar themes as they charted the rise and fall of civilisations.
Moreover, the mere fact that these books are available across the globe suggests the depth and breadth of such concerns.

At the same time they also reveal a passionate commitment to the idea of renewal and reform. Ferguson is clearly a believer in the West’s capacity to re-invent and re-energise itself.

For us in Malaysia, these books – and there are countless others in airport bookshops – reinforce the sense of a world shifting on its axis, of a power alignment that prioritises China and India over Europe and the United States.

We are faced with the challenge of adapting to these newly (re-)emerging powers whilst not forgetting the strengths (or “killer apps”) that made the Western nations great such as the emancipation of women, democracy and religious tolerance.

And it is in this realm that we need writers and historians such as Ferguson and Gopnik – figures who’ll both commend and condemn with equal weight, stepping aside from mere politics.

The new geo-political landscape will demand prodigious powers of concentration and leadership. Mere rhetoric will be useless.

Malay ultras and/or an obsession with bangsawan politics won’t help us in coping with either China and/or India.

History requires candour and honesty. It also demands a degree of openness.

We need to be willing to accept the idea that there are many versions of the truth.

Our narrow-minded views on history hamper us as we chart our way forward.

You need to know yourself in order to plan for the future. Self-knowledge is critical.

I would argue that it’s only when we as Malaysians can start to engage about our collective history with the same vigour and honesty as our counterparts in the West then we’ll be ready to deal with the challenges outlined by these writers.

History – our many histories, Malay, Chinese, Indian, Dayak and so forth – requires objectivity and honesty. If we can’t deal with the past, how can we face the future?

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Making a Chinese dream come true

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CHINA DAILY By ZHU YUAN

BEIJING: Although Chinese People’s American Dream by Shui Guang was only published recently, it was written more than a decade ago when an increasing number of Chinese people who had left China to study abroad began to consider pursuing their career back home.

It made me wonder whether there is a Chinese dream. And if so, what is it?

Without a native religion in the sense of Christianity or Islam, Chinese people’s ethos is characterised by pragmatism.

There is a Peking Opera piece called Happi­ness from Heaven, its lyrics describe a world in which good weather guarantees a bumper harvest, clean and honest government does not impose heavy taxes, well-disciplined residents do not make unreasonable demands, and everyone lives in happiness and peace.
This would be the dream that the majority of Chinese people pursued in ancient times, when they knew little about science, demo­cracy and social institutions.

This dream was shattered when Western powers forced open China’s door and Western ideas of science and democracy entered the country.

Despite the fact that many ordinary residents still cherished the dream of leading a peaceful and comfortable life, characterised by having land to plough and enough food to feed their family, the ideal of creating a society of equality and fairness appealed to some Chinese intellectuals. Hence, the years of civil wars and the struggle for state power between two major political parties dominated the first half of the last century.



If Chinese people had a dream during that period, it was for nothing more than to live in peace.

The founding of People’s Republic of China was the start of a period in which collective consciousness left little room for people to pursue an individual dream. They were told that everyone would be able to get what he or she needs in a communist society, but people must first make sacrifices for its realisation and the common good.

It was not until the late 1970s when the reform and opening-up policy was implemented that Chinese residents as individuals started to pursue their own dreams again.

Market competition in a great variety of fields made it possible for individuals to be audacious enough to cherish a dream of prosperity and success that might be achieved through their own efforts.

After more than half a century of state employment, Chinese people could quit their job to start a business on their own, they could go abroad to study, they could even idle away their time if they had the means to support themselves. They could do anything as long as they did not break the law.

Yet, the dream of a better life is not as simple as it used to be. People used to be content with having enough to eat and wear and a place to live. With much higher living standards and more materialistic temptations, they now have much higher demands of life.

To be a true Chinese Dream, the opportunity should be there for all. However, the increasingly serious corruption among government officials and the widening gap between the haves and have-nots tilt the distribution of social resources and wealth in favour of those in power and those who can manipulate power with money and/or connections. This dampens ordinary residents’ enthusiasm to struggle for their dreams and encourages people to make their dream come true through irregular means.

Common prosperity once identified by Deng Xiaoping as the ultimate goal of economic reform and opening-up necessitates a political will to ensure that the distribution of social wealth is fair.
Image via Wikipedia
A Chinese dream, if there is one, should not be that different from its American counterpart – that life can be better, richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability and achievement regardless of social class or circumstances of birth.

But to achieve this, great efforts are needed on the part of the government and all residents to create an environment in which, as Confucius said, people can go confidently in the direction of their dreams and live the life they have imagined.