A textbook example

I had the privilege of having lunch with a friend of mine the other day. We had a curious conversation which deserves mention here.

This friend of mine explained how people were either book-smart or street-smart. She obviously considered herself among the book-smart, a select group of people populated by intellectuals, mathematicians, and logicians. "Street-smart" was merely a term used to describe people who weren't book-smart. Or so she believed.

I smiled sarcastically and attempted to steer the conversation to different waters.

I'm ashamed to say that I failed.

She carried on with her intellectual train of thought to a very logical conclusion. Which came first: the chicken or the egg? She asked the question with utter seriousness. We were on the brink of slipping into an endless debate concerning the most pointless question on the planet. Time to avert boredom. I threw my hands up in exasperation and declared it an impossible question. Nobody knew and nobody would ever know. The chicken-and-the-egg question was really a metaphor for the unanswerable, I said. Then, with a self-satisfied smirk, she revealed that she knew the chicken came before the egg. She read it in Reader's Digest. The chicken descended from some dinosaur. Reader's Digest said so therefore it was a fact. The chicken came before the egg. She said it all with a sober expression that betrayed an unwavering faith in the timelessness of a Reader's Digest article.

Since a vast knowledge of science has long been a point of pride for this friend of mine, I felt duty-bound to remind her of the limits of science. Science cannot prove anything, I said, it can only tell us what we know at this point. I mentioned Micro- and Macro-Evolution. I believed in the former and not the latter. There can be variations within species, certainly. But I didn't think a chicken was going to evolve from a dinosaur. I went on like this for a while only to discover she had no idea what I was talking about. She stared at me blankly, puzzled and lost, her book-smartness gone with the wind. Micro-Evolution? What? It isn't in the textbook, she mumbled. It isn't in Reader's Digest either, I thought to myself. Aloud, however, I proceeded to enlighten her on matters curiously absent from her textbook.

Then I began to question the authority of school textbooks. She looked flustered and asked what on earth we can believe in if not the things carefully researched and compiled by the souls who wrote her textbooks. What's the point of education if we don't believe everything the textbook says? She challenged.

I laughed. Her question was supposed to be rhetorical, evidently. I wasn't supposed to laugh. But I did. I just succeeded in making her even more flustered. This friend of mine would undoubtedly be offended at being the subject of this post. She'd insist I misunderstood everything she said and deliberately twisted her words to my advantage. I don't care. I heard what I heard and I laughed because it was funny. She completely missed the point of education. And if you don't know what the point of education is then you haven't really learned anything at all. The irony was almost tangible.

I realize that she is but a member of a large and influential tribe who believe in blind faith and unquestioning belief when it comes to receiving information. Our education system has given rise to a breed of students satisfied with what they read in textbooks. They don't think to question the government-approved brand of truth simply because it has to be true. All they need to know - no more, no less - has been encapsulated into those textbooks. If that isn't enough, hey, there's always Reader's Digest. In the words of Syed Husin Ali taken from Malaysiakini:

Higher Education Strategic Plan - A Critique

At present, learning at that level is almost by rote, and independent and critical minds are not encouraged. Even at the university level, a critical and creative mind is not encouraged or nurtured.

Oh yes, I agree. Our education system has indeed succeeded in raising a book-smart generation. They're whizzes at doing what computers can do. What's lacking are minds capable of critical thought and analysis.

To make a tiresome politically correct statement, of course there are minds in the Malaysian education system capable of critical thought and analysis. Yes, there are bright sparks. Yes, it is grossly unfair to paint everybody the same colour. Yes, yes. I know. I've heard it all before. But it is also grossly unfair to say the Malaysian education system is consistently producing students of the sort. The outstanding students, the ones who go far, never do hold much stock in school and school alone anyway. They have the ability of looking beyond textbooks.

It's when the average student places a blind faith in school to teach him everything he needs to know that things start to go downhill. He memorizes a few dates, a formula or two, the Theory of Relativity, and he begins to feel smart. He commits entire textbooks to memory and he feels spiritually closer to Gregor Mendel. He begins to equate school with education and education with memorization. He begins to boast of book-smartness. In doing so he misses the point of education altogether. As my encounter with this friend of mine proved, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The point of education, my dear friend, is not in believing everything the textbook says but asking why we should believe it at all.

Never let your schooling interfere with your education.