I ALWAYS and will always stand by the assertion that school sucks – ironic considering that I am an educator in my “day job”.

Although academically I was fine in school – I got several A1’s in my Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia exam, particularly in English and Accounting – I wasn’t particularly ambitious and had a propensity for daydreaming.

I loved the window seats in classrooms since they were conducive to my daydreaming during classes and my only ambition then was to work my way somehow to that particular aisle since windows are, well, windows to the world.

There is a certain innocence that I’m sure is lost to Gen Z’s and millennials but in great abundance in the pre-internet age of the early 1990s. But one must be cautious to not wax lyrical too much on such nostalgia.

The subject that was kryptonite was mathematics. It was the one subject that made me feel stupid but also probably the one that required most practice to get better at and one thing that I still detest as a musician is practice.

Call me consistent. By default, this lack of love for arithmetic would eventually lead me downriver towards the arts stream – the habitat of misfits as judged by our national education system’s stratification.

This became more evident when I entered Form 4 because the private school I attended was newly opened and only had a class each for the Arts and Science students and our classrooms were right opposite each other – the perfect physical metaphor to how opposite our collective behaviour was.

I had teachers who broke down mid-lesson and left us because nobody paid attention. I lost count of the number of times we were scolded by teachers from the Science class for making too much noise. We even had a sentry to keep a lookout for the headmaster by the corridor at times.

We even got banned from the school science lab (Science was one of my favourite subjects) because one idiotic classmate turned on the Bunsen burner without permission and burnt something that smelt foul. And we had a frosty competition with the nerds in Science during football matches, although we eventually won the last match we ever played (I self-captained the team) although the nerds disputed this fact.

Based on these anecdotes, it is easy to stereotype the Arts stream as it is already stereotyped.

So, it was refreshing when decades later, while giving a writing workshop for visiting high school students at the university college I was teaching at then, a bright 15-year-old student came up to me at the end to vent his anger at the establishment.

In particular, he was angry at how everyone – from his parents, siblings, relatives and his teachers – were discouraging him from wanting to join the Arts stream in his school. He was angry that the arts had a negative connotation and he noticed this systemic attempt to not only curtail his desire to join the Arts stream but also the arts in general.

His fellow students around him – they had circled to thank me as I walked out of the hall – seemed to also agree in unison. I concurred and confirmed his anger and hypothesis and told him I felt the exact same way when “I was your age”.

I’m wondering where this student is now and I hope he kept to his proverbial guns and went along with his path of choice. Mind you, the binary distinction between the arts and the sciences is a simplistic one – this distinction primarily serves capitalism. Both my parents are scientists and they, too, see a problem with simplistic binary.

And this, Dear Reader, is why the arts matters and even more so if this cultural attitude persists in Malaysia – being sidelined builds character but there also needs to be guidance by those who are bestowed with responsibilities over students, and guidance is hard to come by if you look around nowadays.

That’s why children look to their peers and worse, the internet (via social media) if parents and teachers can’t lend an emphatic ear.

It’s hardly surprising that most indie rock musicians (even some of my bandmates) are engineering graduates and some even pursue careers outside of engineering – because they were “smart”, they were singled out, sent packing to the Science stream, and in a way forced to study engineering.

One of my bassists quit his job as a mechanical engineer because he missed human contact and became an insurance agent. Coming from a rural working-class background, his academic achievements in school helped with his social and economic mobility for sure but it left a void which, I’m happy, is filled with a job that was meaningful and fruitful to him.

The only field that bridges this superficial “arts v science” binary is architecture – but even then, it’s an uphill battle for those with passion in dealing with artless developers who have got the money. I know because my brother is an architect.

The arts is not the problem – it’s our collective systemic attitude towards it. We can spend all day discussing the roots of this but one of it must surely be our modernisation and developmental policies which pursue the Sciences. This is because this stream will eventually create professions that can build “important” things such as roads, buildings, hospitals, vaccines, skyscrapers and whatnot.

And, of course, building these things is big money from which contracts can be procured and shady deals be done.

What can the Arts stream build? Well, if you can’t answer that, ponder it over your delivered meal or Frappuccino – that pondering is neither “arts” nor “science”: it’s “thinking”, and “thinking” can’t be stratified. It’s hard to make money from corrupting the arts compared to the sciences.

One thing that the arts does indeed do is to make you think for yourself – and that’s what corporations and the powers that be dislike. – June 18, 2021.

* 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.