Prejudice and bias in our education system

An interesting article titled ‘ Time to look beyond the Western view of the Middle East’ by an educator, Koh Choon Hwee, appeared in the Today paper on 23 Nov.  such articles are rare in a system where everyone blindly get along with western views as the official and right views of events around the world, including domestic issues.

Koh Choon Hwee discovered through her teachings in the schools that our young have been set up with very simplistic views of the Middle East as a region of deserts, camels and veiled women. How so, and she explained everything in these few words:

‘After passing through an education system in which we are more likely to study Shakespeare rather than the Persian poet Hafez, we have inadvertently been imparted with an understanding of the world as viewed from the British Isles and an ideology of the current world order that is viewed from North America, with is associated prejudices and blind spots.’

Having such a viewpoint is not so innocent as it seems. It has far reaching consequences in the psychic and mentality of the people. What is good to the west, favourable to the west but bad or unfavourable to us, would get pass as acceptable if one does not take time to consider what it should be. If the Westerners said your father is bad, your gene is inferior, the unthinking will go on parroting the same silly stuff without knowing that they have been made victims and happily going along with it.

The fault does not lie just with the education system. It is the whole system that make the people think like they are westerners, transforming ourselves ‘into an Anglophone society, and there are logical consequences of these policy decisions.’ The main media(print and screen) is the biggest culprit if you look at the amount of silly articles copied from western media and passed off as the truth, the right things to read, the right way to think.

As a result, our people do not see the world in a balanced perspective and least of all in our very own perspective. We don’t have our own perspectives. Many open and close their mouths thinking and parroting views of westerners unconsciously and making a fool of themselves unknowingly.  The schools and the media have a heavy responsibility to educate our people to think for ourselves, to be discriminating, and to start thinking that what is good for the West is not necessarily good for us.

They even published stupid stuff and comments by foreign con men and women and fakes rubbishing our own people as stupid and no talents without questioning. In the same breath they are also rubbishing our institutions of higher learnings, the faculties, for wasting public money to produce waste. And none even notice this and simply agreed that our institutions are dysfunctional, only good for beauty contest. As a result we have turned our people into unthinking daft and accepting that we are daft submissively and apologetically. So everyone could only think about more training and attending more courses to be better. They forgot to structure a course to teach them how to think and how not to be stupid.

PS. This sickness, to see the world from the western perspective and to think and behave like Westerners pervade the whole society right from the top. Even academics, supposedly intelligent and critically thinking people, also act the same way and write their rubbish using western world views to look at things and events instead of from out own perspective and interests.