No private school please, we are Malaysians

These days, Cat Stevens’s “Wild World” keeps me awake at night.

A year ago, days after emerging out of a Sekolah Rendah to register my daughter for Year 1, I wrote about my concern over the way our public schools are turning into madrasahs.

There I was, a practising Muslim who was worried that his little one would be attending a school littered with Islamic cosmetics everywhere, the kind which has invaded our TV channels.

I was worried that my kid would be denied a multiracial and multi-religious experience, the kind which is so needed in Malaysian life.

I am still worried. What if she is peer pressured into wearing the tudung at an age where her body should have nothing to do with feminine sexuality? What if she is made to listen to half-baked religious lectures by salary-earning bureaucrats who would have done better as stand-up comedians?

A few weeks back, I went back to the school to confirm her enrolment in Year 1, which begins about a month from now. I was handed a piece of paper with two columns to be filled by parents: one for name and the other for race. Strangely enough, the column for race was already filled in and immortalised with the printed word “Melayu”.

Although I never claim to be a Malay, nor have I registered my kids as one for reasons I have made public in a letter to my daughter (which is a sort of an affidavit in case she decides to sue me one day for the loss of her constitutional benefits), I would never make a big fuss to insist on my biological “race”. Race is, after all, a myth, not a biological reality. Which is why I dutifully wrote her name next to the “Malay” column.

Once again, I left the school compound with a big sense of worry about the future of our daughter being sent to one of modern days’ necessary evils: school (marriage, violence, holy men, nationhood and Ibrahim Ali being the other needed evils).

In recent times, this necessary evil has gone private and tried to make itself attractive to parents like me, who still are not convinced that school is a place of learning and knowledge. Armed with glossy pamphlets, they invade kindies and malls, exploiting the poor public perception of government schools. Sometimes fronted by a cheerful American blonde expat teacher, they talk to us about the future of our children. Pictures of smiling children are juxtaposed against charts showing expert-endorsed programmes to bring out the best in your kids.

But is school a place for that? It is not.

Prophet Muhammad said that knowledge is a lost property, and it is up to us to seek it anywhere. School, on the other hand, is where a child is supposed to learn not only about life but also about the rough side of it. It is where a child sees things beyond the four walls of her home.

She sees how other children are treated by their parents, and brings home cultures which have never set foot in her own house before her schooling years. It is where she learns about money and how some of her friends have no problem buying burgers and soft drinks during recess, while some do not have anything during recess because they have no pocket money.

It is where a child picks up language which will one day come in handy in life: crude language, obscene language, street language, courteous language, body language – all these are usually transferred to her through her interaction with the cacophony of characters at school.

And that’s why public school is the way to go for the development of the wholesome child. While critics have argued that public schools in Malaysia have become more mono-cultured, the same criticism can be levelled at private schools, whose demography has no room for the son of the postman, the daughter of the single mom factory worker, or that of the Proton Saga-driving RM1800-salary-earning civil servant who works at the land office, or the gorgeous dashing journalist who spends his time writing this column to pay his monthly internet and phone bills.

If school is a place to pass exams and excel in sports which require fancy facilities, then private schools are probably the kind of factory your kids need. They don’t have to put up with the smelly unwashed shirts that some kids wear to school, or the constant soft-loan of 10-20 sen to their friends (well, that was the going rate in the eighties). You also don’t get scary tales from your friend whose parents beat the crap out of them for sneaking into their lorry-driver fathers’ old porn stacks.

In this factory, you go to school because your parents can afford the few hundreds of ringgit in monthly fees and the thousands of dollars in annual fees and deposits. You make friends with sons and daughters of businessmen, doctors, lawyers, Datuks and Tan Sris, many of whom usually start school with their overseas family vacation tales.

You will never meet in real life the postman’s child, or that of the government clerk, the skull-capped motorcycle-riding Quran teacher, the sweaty, smelly aircon serviceman, or the soyabean drink peddler who can’t afford to travel all the way to that Chinese school where his cousins send their children to.

Here, you will also hardly hear any racist remarks from teachers, for such teachers are bound by the “customer charter” between the school and your parents, the customer.

In contrast, public school is where you meet these people. You will meet angels and scums. You will meet those whose parents are at the corridors of power (assuming we take one Mr Khairy Jamaluddin’s claim at face value) and the garbage collector who doubles as a pasar malam businessman selling cheap China-made “Frozen” paraphernalia.

Public school offers a wholesome experience of the world, much like channel cruising on your couch from morning till night, only that this is real.

Yet, it is funny to see private schools, whether vernacular or religious or secular, claiming that they have the best solution for your child. One Islamic private school near my house even has a motto suggesting that they are out to create “global citizens”. 

Global citizens, in an environment without non-Muslim kids, when three quarters of humanity don’t live your Islamic lifestyle?

Global citizens, without the greasy motorcycles or Ahpek buses waiting outside after school, but only Brabuses driven by bush-jacket-clad men, or smaller Japanese luxuries driven by tudung-wearing Muslim wives who own that Muslim women’s fashion boutique that has come to characterise the work of a bored well-fed Muslim housewife.

So, you see, call me a sour grape. Like the proverbial fox, I will never be able to reach the grapes. But here’s what I am grateful for. I am grateful that my daughter will be going to a school with all that she’ll need to prepare for life. She can see the injustice in the name of race, the hypocrisy in the name of religion, the poverty behind economic success, and maybe, she can come out as a true global citizen of the world!

To my daughter: I’ll try to make up for whatever you miss at school. If they tell you there is only one way to heaven, I will show you the other ways (yes, and some of them tread very close to hell).

And once in a while, when you are bored with your friends’ tales, we’ll beat the crap out of you too so you can drift back into society.

Meantime, I hope you make a lot of nice friends out there,
But just remember there's a lot of bad, and beware... – November 28, 2014.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.