During my doctoral days, I read two very important and then quite popular books in the US. One was entitled, The Schooling of America and the other, The Closing of the American Mind .

Today, almost 20 years later, it appears that most of our so-called educated and learned elders of our society appear to have not read these books or to have learnt the lessons arising from them.

One recent debate in Parliament the past month reminded me of how much the August house has also become of house of lies, untruths, and half-baked theories with some false hypotheses.

I therefore call upon the Parliamentarians not to cakap kosong (indulge in empty chatter). For, that is not the k-world the nation is talking about. Let me try to make my \’k-point\’.

My father-in-law, the late Harold Joseph Gross, never finished formal education because World War II had started and the US was involved. But he became a student of learning and carried an open attitude to learning throughout his life.

While at the Institute of Public Services Administration, I once argued that we only stop learning when we have learnt the last lesson of life from death itself. My father-in-law has stopped learning, but not until death took away the sting of his desire to learn.

But his earthly attitude of continuous learning is one I hope all the children and grandchildren will emulate until we have also learnt that last lesson. We can all learn to unlearn and relearn new truths every day, if we are open to this.

Matter of \’force\’?

Recently, while I was reminding my two youngest children aged 11 and 13 about the important of practising their piano pieces in order to learn and excel at music, the 11-year-old had a question. I was bemoaning the fact that we spend so much money on lessons but that the kids do not appreciate and learn music as they should.

Jeshua responded very candidly: \”But that is because you force us to learn the piano!\”

That provoked me into another discourse with my kids on the nature of learning and the roots of the word \’knowledge\’ or \’gnosis\’. I explained to Jeshua that parents do not force their children to learn. They only encourage learning, sometimes by fair and other times by less than fair means. Thus, I explained that Jeshua\’s concept of \’force\’ as an attitude regarding the \’restriction of choice\’, which is not an acceptable definition to me as the parent.

Then I asked Jeshua a rhetorical question but which was designed to teach. I asked whether the laws of nature \’forced\’ him to stay on the ground. He said \’No\’ emphatically. Point made, I think or at least this daddy hopes so!

Now, back to Parliament and the lack of \’Augustness\’ in the House. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has called on all of us to re-establish the honour and dignity of Parliament. And he told the people to work with him, not for him. This is my miniscule attempt to do so.

With a few exceptions, most parliamentarians talk basic and simplistic logic which does not often add up to gnosis or knowledge most of the time. They also fail in logic 101 most of the time. All data is not knowledge, and neither is all information knowledge. Data can be shaped to bring out both information and knowledge but there are some very implicit and specific scientific rules to do that. They are the substance of the subject called statistics.

Value-added data can also become information and information can then become knowledge in the hands of an appropriate and trained user of both data and information. Good handling of both data and information in the right hands of a rational head with a requisite good heart can produce effective knowledge.

Knowledge often badly handled becomes ignosis or ignorance clearly revealed. And, others who know, understand that difference. My professor at George Washington University, Sayeed Hossein Nasr, used to say, \”a veil hides as much as it reveals\”. Information badly handled is like a veil of secrecy which hides the so-called truth as much as it reveals the falsities. When this happens gnosis can become ignosis or ignorance.

Unilateral action

Now to my case in point. Opposition leader Lim Kit Siang\’s query about a non-Muslim girl being forced to wear a headscarf at the International Islamic University convocation, received a parliamentary reply that it was merely a \’cultural issue\’.

The underlying logic is that non-Muslim students were not being \’forced\’ to become Muslims but only to adorn the headscarf. With all due respect, a veil reveals as much as it hides.

Consequently, some of my sincere questions and concerns are:

1.Why is one university taking unilateral action on this issue, when even face-to-face with the King, non-Muslims have never been forced to wear even the baju melayu ? Pardon me, but an Islamic University is Islamic because of the content and not because of \’how the grass is cut\’.

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Can Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman force all its students to wear the cheongsam ? Since when did dress codes in universities become an issue of national unity, when there are more important and severe issues related to national unity, like the rooming together of non-Muslims and Muslims?

Thankfully, Abdullah\’s cabinet has again ruled wisely on this issue. My question from my son becomes relevant: are our undergraduate students \’being forced to play the piano?\’ Is this not the basic and fundamental question regarding the issue? I, for one, will categorically not allow my children to be forced in this way. On the other hand, out of my own volition, as have so many Malaysian ambassadors, I will any day wear the baju melayu as I do view it as a national costume for men. Some items are genuinely cultural and yet others fully religious in significance. Like the symbol of the cross, it is always Christian, and there are no two ways about it.

2. Professor Jacobus, my professor of Administration and Management at Universiti Malaya\’s economics faculty in 1970 taught me to separate \’the world of ideas from the world of action\’. From the minister\’s parliamentary answer and subsequent dialogue, I find some ignosis built into the logic and premise of the answer. The null hypothesis is that students learn character from their dress code. Or, put in another way, we can train our undergraduates for national unity and uniformity in thinking and action by teaching them how to dress! Ignosis. Moreover, if we have failed to teach them \’national character development\’ by the time they are 18, I think we have failed with their national schooling programme. The university is not their correctional institution.

3. The world of ideas has a direct and positive correlation to the world of action. We call the study of this relationship, human behaviour. Behavioral Science studies started especially after World War I with scientific experiments on dogs and rats of Pavlovian and Skinnerian fame.

\"\"Behaviorism resulted from the \’prediction of behaviour of humans\’ by extrapolation from studies with dogs and rats. Skinner and Pavlov are important Gurus on this subject. The subsequent Human Resources Movement started after World War II when most theories could not \’explain adequately the behaviour of Adolf Hitler and the blindly-obedience of the Germans to Hitler\’s atrocities\’.

These social scientists then questioned some of the fundamental assumptions about the nature of man and concluded that we cannot simply extrapolate from the studies of animals to the behaviour of man.

Most recently, the \’human being studies movement\’ have argued that humans are beings and thus cannot be treated without \’basic human freedoms\’ guaranteed under the UN Human Rights Declaration. Man has therefore been liberated from the \’force\’ that Jeshua complained about. But, not under unlimited circumstances or occasions.

4. In the world of action then, are humans always only guided by their own rational logic, family teaching and/or spiritual values? What is the real nature of man? Is man sinful by design of creation? Is man good at birth before slowly deteriorating into badness over time because of the influences of the environment? Wherein lies man\’s personal responsibility and accountability for all his actions of both commission and omission?

These questions lead us to study the nature of, not just man, but also nature itself called ontology or the study of the nature of reality. In my doctoral studies I had to study and review the nature of human dignity and therefore was \’forced\’ to review the nature of nature theories, which most of us would call comparative religious studies, or a study of different philosophies.

My teacher, Prof SH Nasr in his book, Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man was most informative and educational for me to argue my case, apart from the learning experience from the great teacher himself.

Three stages

Finally, back to Jeshua\’s null hypothesis as to whether parents are forcing the children to learn needs to be reviewed and understood for what it is; a valid and good question. All individuals and systems go through at least three stages of growth or development in the most basic form. If my organising theory holds true, I believe it explains behaviour of individuals in all systems; whether from large nation state systems or even larger concepts of ethnic communities.

Stage 1 of the theory is when the individuals are in a state of almost absolute relational dependency. Growth is this stage is a function of the older or more mature system and their dictation of the meaning and definition of growth or development.

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The second stage is a movement towards independence from dependence. The quality and quantity of dependence is a function of the substantive content and the quality of the process of growth into maturity. Malaysia, for example, maybe a first world nation in terms of infrastructure (and almost totally creative and independent in terms of the construction industry) but is only still a third world nation in terms of culture and our way of life in the use of our first class roads and highways.

Why else do we allow so many to die every year during our so-called \’ balik kampung fever\’. We have all the data about the deaths, but do not have the information and knowledge to prevent these deaths, every year. In the life of individuals, in Stage 1 therefore, the parents or provider of the service always gnosis or knows better, and therefore decides for or on behalf of the dependents. That cannot be viewed as \’force\’ much like the force of gravity as in the laws of nature.

Stage 2 is when we allow the children more or greater freedoms, as time passes, and then even help them to prioritise and make intelligent choices for themselves. These are the growing up years from about 12-13 to pre-college years. And, real independence happens, as in my own experience, usually when we are at the ages of 23-25 when we are financially independent and socially free of others and yet other cultural commitments; unless we decide to follow them based on our own convictions.

Again this varies with cultures, wherein in some cultures, the cultural pressure or norm encourages children even at the age or 13 or 14 to experiment with sex, for instance. Now the Durex surveys say we are \’catching up with this sickness\’. In eastern societies and traditional cultures, sex before marriage is totally not acceptable.

Finally, at about the time we are ready to \’move on in life\’ with marriage, we move into what is called Stage 3, the interdependence stage. At this stage, we \’give away our children in marriage\’ and come alongside them and help them to make choices and decisions that will see them through life. They learn more by observation and personal experimentation than by \’teaching\’.

Misguided hypothesis

Based on this theory of the process of growth in living organisms, allow me to review and refute the ignosis of logic embedded in the unfortunate parliamentary reply which has now been superseded by the cabinet\’s wise decision.

The basic thesis contained in the reply is wrong and misguided from my study of human dignity. The null hypothesis that an individual\’s basic maturity and character formation have not taken place until the undergraduate years is truly misguided and maligned. It is my considered view that personal values and moral character foundations are laid well before we are about 15 years old.

After that, all of us only \’test limits and boundaries\’ of the degrees of freedoms we can all enjoy, until we are mature enough to begin to realise otherwise. Then we fully realise where we stand, when we begin to nurture our own children into maturity. We also then realise that we may not be better teachers than our parents.

To my mind, it is too late to teach old dogs new tricks at the university level. If undergraduates cannot speak decent English by then, and they cannot express themselves clearly in terms of public speaking, have insufficient moral or ethical values (i.e. if 30 percent say that they will become corrupt if given the opportunity) then the focus of our post-secondary education system must be not to teach them \’how to dress up\’, but rather to draw on the philosophical and educational reservoirs of modern education for whcih both the Western and eastern forms of higher education are famous.

Enforcing dress codes is among the least important ways to teach 20-25 year olds anything about values and character. These focus on form and sacrifice substance. I believe that Nasr would fully agree with me.

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So, I was saddened by the reply in Parliament which argued falsely that the optional nature of dressing among students can be traded for compulsory forms of dress code, even if only for the convocation.

I sincerely hope that campus authorities can take a more strategic look at the role of universities in maturing our young into responsible global citizens instead of spoonfeeding them into a permanent dependency in a very competitive world.

The migration of our nation towards a knowledge economy, or the very creation and production of knowledge products and knowledge capital must become the primary responsibility of the universities. The creative and innovative process must be learnt through trial, experimentation and failure but not by standardisation and uniform schooling of our undergraduates.

The concerns of nation building must remain the focus and priority of the education ministry. If they are not successful after 12 years of schooling, then our entire primary and secondary education system is a failure. It would be too late for universities to make a difference.