A UNIVERSITY education is often understood as an opportunity for someone to gain upward mobility economically and socially, notably in a country like Malaysia where the developmentalist drive is informed by our post-colonial condition and desire to move on from our former agrarian roots.

A tertiary education in the past would guarantee an individual at least the potential to be gainfully and meaningfully employed in less hard labour-based professions (especially if the person comes from a rural and working-class background) with a better income bracket, which in turn would improve their immediate family economically and socially.   

This is how most will romantically associate tertiary education, and to be fair, it’s still relevant today given the present inequality in income and social mobility that plague the nation.

One may hypothesise that these problems still persist because of our education system but I’d also point the finger to something we tend to overlook collectively as a society: our education culture.

As a result of our developmentalist history and policies towards education (which is well intentioned, just not implemented effectively), we have developed a very utilitarian attitude and understanding of what a tertiary education connotes.

In other words, a tertiary education should be “useful” and “practical” rather than something abstract or merely interest-driven. As a result, a lot of scholarships tend to be in the sciences – throw a rock in the Klang Valley and I’m sure it will land on an engineer (of any specialisation).

Accordingly, middle- and upper-class parents tend to encourage (if not force) their child to major in something “useful”. 

As a full-time academic in a private institution, I have to also sell my programmes at university open days and education fairs and trust me I have encountered such parents consistently throughout the decades.

However, I have seen the softening of parents’ attitudes through the years as generational shifts of parents also reflect the changing mindset. The parents now are those who were forced to study something they not necessarily enjoyed but were able to do since they most probably got good grades academically in high school.

On the flip side, your major in university is not a life sentence. You can pursue other fields outside of what you majored in.

It’s not wasted – university is the place where you learn how to learn. We learn to be adaptable beings and understand that we change according to our circumstances and opportunities.

I’ve witnessed the shift from parents telling me “I don’t know all this film or drama stuff, don’t know why my son/daughter want to do this” to “I want my son/daughter to study something they are interested in, not like what I went through”.

The latter came from a parent who was a successful engineer but admitted that as much as it paid well, it’s not really a fun job and he felt that part of the purpose of him being successful was to be able to provide for his children the opportunity and choice to also progress in terms of what they wanted to pursue. 

While it’s an interesting paradigm shift and, of course, encouraging for someone like me because it means I still have an income, it’s also a reminder that a tertiary education is also contextual depending on the student’s and parent’s backgrounds.

Class (not classroom) is always a determining factor when it comes to shaping our understanding of a nation’s education culture.

The fact that some still think that university time should be expedited in favour of students joining the workforce or industry sooner is problematic. Such an attitude is the symptom of this utility mindset towards education.

Universities are not job factories. Of course, it’s harder to show off in a pie or gant chart the qualitative progress of one’s intellectual development and character development compared to the quantitative number of graduates getting jobs in the workforce, but it is the exact fetishisation of quantitative data over qualitative data that plagues our education culture. 

In fact, I believe subjects like philosophy should be emphasised even more to build character and critical thinking. We have graduates but most aren’t taught how to think – to think for themselves.

But of course, thinking is hard to show off physically. One tends to appear to be doing nothing at all when one is thinking and the act is hard to exploit in advertisements or statistics save for the cliched image of the Thinker.

Most critically, it all also depends on WHO is doing the teaching, not the subject itself.

This is where some academics take the vocation as a “job” in which KPIs dictate every action and being subservient to intake numbers and such.

Perceiving students as “clients” or “customers” also disregards the collegial nature of mentors and mentees (and of course there are some who abuse this position) – a relationship that exists outside of capitalist logic.

Some too take careerist routes to climb the ladder and disregard their principles in pursuit of positions and accolades.  

We can’t seem to shake the developmentalist monkey off our back because we’re still, well, developing as an entity.

Developing “what” is another question – are we just developing workers to feed the machinery or are we developing individuals with knowledge and principles? Ideally it should be a balance of both, of course, but we don’t live in an ideal world.    

October 5 was World Teachers Day but in our local higher education permutation it was dubbed “Hari Akademia” or “Academia Day” instead of “Hari Akademik” or “Academics Day”, which would be the the more precise relative word to “teachers”. This celebrates the institution (academia) instead of the profession (academics).

Is this merely coincidence or sleight of hand? You be the judge.

To me, it symbolically shows that the Man doesn’t value the individual academic, it values the system.

The system keeps the majority dumb and lulled while the Man converts the gullible with riches and plunders the coffers with great abandon. – October 8, 2021.