ONE thing I have come to discover about formal education is the lack or emphasis on experiential learning.

Formally, I am not trained as a musician – a common trait among most iconic musicians, singers and singer-songwriters… not that I’m boasting I am among the “iconic” – but this should point to an obvious and glaring phenomenon: talent and desire without experience can only get you so far.

But we must also question the “idea” what we perceive as “talent” or “desire” come from.

I am sure the same can be said about a lot of other professions but I will stick with what I am familiar most as a practitioner and academic. This boils down to the basic question about our intellect and education: does observation or ideas come first?

Philosopher and renowned pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer presents this question right at the start of his work “On Education” and presents this in the opening paragraph:

The nature of our intellect is such that “ideas” are said to spring by abstraction from “observations”, so that the latter are in existence before the former. If this is really what takes place, as is the case with a man who has merely his own experience as his teacher and book, he knows quite well which of his observations belong to and are represented by each of his ideas; he is perfectly acquainted with both, and accordingly he treats everything correctly that comes before his notice. We might call this the natural mode of education.

This “natural mode of education” he suggests here may encompass the journey of learning through tactile activities in which we learn through trials and errors.

Making mistakes is an important part of learning but as an educator I find it worrying that the culture of “perfection” has ideologically permeated our collective consciousness that it has interrupted and distracted away from the actual intention of education. None is more obvious, to me at least, than music.

I had formally learnt music (the piano) from the age of seven to 10 years old and as children are quick learners, I picked it up very quickly. I recall playing some classical pieces with ease by the age of nine but the study was interrupted when my family had to move due to my parents’ sabbatical leave and relocation as academics.

I went to a small music school above a shoplot in Ampang Jaya and was taught by the teacher/owner herself whom I recall was rather fierce with other students from what I heard through the music room doors (they weren’t soundproofed back then in the 1980s) but she was kind to me.

Maybe I was talented or maybe I was charming, I have no idea why.

Nevertheless, as dexterous as I was on the piano, I was oblivious to the social and cultural contexts of the pieces I was learning – essentially what I call “music from dead white male Europeans” as I joke in between banter during my live shows.

I learnt music and compositions from non-indigenous sources but was this a false form of education to me? After all, I had very little life experiences as most children do, and were those who forwarded this form of music education “guilty” of pushing this foreign and exported form of knowledge, too? I don’t think so.

To me, any knowledge is knowledge for knowledge has no malice. However, developing the intellectual capacity to think for oneself is and this is where Schopenhauer’s presentation of the duality between “ideas” and “observations” is important. No school in Malaysia presents this fundamental question – probably not even in teacher training.

Education systems are not neutral in this political world. They are loaded with ideology not necessarily in content but more so in what is presented as “essential subjects” to the curriculum.

Again, I’m using music as an example here but you may apply this same method of inquiry to any form of knowledge since there is still-present misinformation about music and intellectual development, which has become the bane of Asian helicopter parents.

My “natural form of education” came from playing music on the streets of Perth, Australia and later the underground music venues in the Klang Valley.

If I had a choice, music students should do their internship not with companies or competitions but to hit the streets and the culture on the ground to have a real taste of what role music plays in everyday life among everyday people.

Music as a field, like most endeavours, is defined and shaped by your socio-economic class and class itself as a concept is never taught or discussed in our classrooms (pun intended).

What we have now in most education institutions and systems is the predominance of ideas that precedes observation – the source of the shallow method known as rote learning.

We have a long way to go folks to correct things and the burden will be on our children’s children to carry on this corrective action and that will take a lot of generational stamina.

So, as a musician, I have to deal constantly (even with myself) the predominance of ideas about things clouding my judgment and artistic moves and challenging them with my own lived observations.

Similarly, as an educator, I have to forward the importance of observations over ideas to my students for being book smart alone is not enough – it needs to be amalgamated with street smart.

But in a world where training (where “ideas” appear first and foremost) preceded experience (the realm of “observations”), we are increasingly inundated with educators with a lot of learnt ideas but little real observations.

This is aptly captured in the Malay proverb (do they still teach this in school?): “Cikgu kencing berdiri, murid kencing berlari (The teacher urinates while standing, the student urinates while running)”, which translates roughly to “Monkey see, monkey do.” – January 14, 2022.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.