Natalie Shobana Ambrose – (25th March, 2010 – theSun)
It was my first day at university where I heard the words "In my class you’ve got to be critical thinkers." Critical what? I thought.
It was my first day at university where I heard the words "In my class you’ve got to be critical thinkers." Critical what? I thought.
Don’t we just listen intently, take some notes, plagiarise other people’s work in our assignments, memorise the text book and regurgitate it out in the exams. Isn’t that critical thinking enough?
What a slap in the face that was.
If I went through the list, did I think clearly and rationally? Questionable.
Could I engage in reflective and independent thinking? Most definitely not.
I couldn’t evaluate ideas and arguments, or detect inconsistencies.
When I read something I believed it to be true without question.
Could I reflect it back to what I knew and believed? No.
Did I know how relevant something was in the bigger scheme of what was happening in the world? Again no.
The reality was there was no such thing as critical thinking in my vocabulary up to my first class at university oceans away from home. I never asked questions in school, I was too scared.
In fact, I had a math teacher in school that didn’t give our class homework because the understanding was that we students were not bright enough and would get it all wrong anyway. So my parents had to send me to extra tuition classes – mind you, I would have still needed them had the teacher actually taught the class.
In fact, I had a math teacher in school that didn’t give our class homework because the understanding was that we students were not bright enough and would get it all wrong anyway. So my parents had to send me to extra tuition classes – mind you, I would have still needed them had the teacher actually taught the class.
Case in point; I was no critical thinker. I did think a lot, though not critically, more philosophically, about how the periodic table was going to help me in life if I weren’t going to be a scientist.
But the fact remains, that I didn’t learn to be a critical thinker for most of my student life. No, I’m not a snob, just a product of the Malaysian education system which formed the foundation of my academic life. Critical thinking entered my vocabulary first at university outside Malaysia.
As an international student I realised a few things. The first was that I was not as exposed to opportunities and I wasn’t as aware.
Sure, I spoke two languages, which was great but most people collect languages. My version of English is different and I was translating from Bahasa Malaysia to English most of the time.
Speaking up in class was out of my culture and years later still feels like something foreign. But perhaps I also felt confined by the many rules of my education history in Malaysia.
I came back and went to university in Malaysia and it was hard, because once again I felt confined.
University students are to be challenged to think, question, reason. After all, university is the fertile soil where students should be allowed to raise their voice, make known their doubts, express themselves while lecturers and professors research topics which interest them, not having to steer away from topics deemed sensitive like politics.
In many parts of the world, that is what a university is in the business of doing. But in Malaysia we have the Universities and University Colleges Act that dictates the thinking of academia and students right down to banning students from attending a national student congress because it’s deemed political.
If universities are not to allow students to be politically aware, does that mean no politician should be giving out scrolls at graduation ceremonies?
The world of academia needs to be free from the puppet strings of politics.
It also needs to encourage critical thinking.
We learn from mistakes, from asking questions, from doing and if all our education system is creating are robots who just believe without questioning, we’re not developing.
Our bid for developed status should include having thinking Malaysians heading corporations, businesses and think tanks, not losing them to brain drain.
Intelligence is not the number of A’s on the result slip, it’s the ability to think critically and applying oneself.
But instead, we’re so scared of people who think, question and have opinions and instead of building up we’re tearing down the intelligentsia of Malaysia and self-sabotaging our country in the process.
What has struck me most about education overseas is that I learnt so much more about other countries as case studies while there is little material from Malaysia.
Is that perhaps because we’re not willing or not allowed to carry out unbiased research of the country?
I am sure that there are pockets of critical thinkers in Malaysia nurtured by a group of dedicated educators but we cannot just tell anecdotal stories of this. We need to nurture thinkers of all sorts if we want to create a Malaysia with a number if front of it.
H.L. Mencken once said "Men become civilised, not in proposition to their willingness to believe, but in their readiness to doubt."
It’s time we started thinking more critically.
Natalie isn’t always critically thinking but wonders aloud about the fate of the thinking Malaysian student.
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