Well over 100 restless Chinese secondary students sat buzzing in endless fidgeting movements in the cramped hall, waiting for my introduction to philosophy in what was meant to be the inaugural event of their new school philosophy club.

Constant admonition from the teachers present did not quiet them down. It did not help that the rickety air-conditioners did not work too well.

Shouting with the help of a microphone above the din, I asked, as a sort of preamble to a meaningful dialogue, why they should want to go to school and study. An arm shot up in the front row. A bright looking well-fed young boy roared heartily, "Why, to make money of course!"

I wondered then, how Confucius or Socrates would have responded to this honest outburst of narrow-mindedness about the grand purpose of education.

After all, this was one of the top Chinese secondary schools in the country, and the tired aged principle had just told me in his office a few moments ago that they had to raise a million ringgit every month to keep the school going. Politics as it was, he said, they would not get a single cent from the government.

Thinking that all those millions must produce some good, I launched into a long discourse on the reality of life. I reminded these boys and girls that a recent university graduate in engineering or other technical disciplines would get a starting salary of less than RM1600. A non-technical graduate would get even less. There are tens of thousands of graduates out of work.

A chicken rice peddler by the roadside, I declared triumphantly, would double that income. If making money is their goal, I proposed, they should all drop out of school and start selling chicken rice by the roadside!

Those in the back rows were still busy with their private but noisy pre-occupation. Those in the first three rows stared at me in bemused puzzlement, as if I had just landed from Mars.

Images of angry parents coming after me for misleading the youths of the city flashed across my mind. Jacque Derrida used to fight hard for having philosophy taught in secondary schools in France and succeeded. But this was Malaysia. They have not even started to teach philosophy in all our universities, for crying out loud! I beat a hasty retreat, and ended my very brief career as a philosophy teacher.

Socrates and Confucius, if they were alive today, would not be able to find a job as a teacher. They do not seem to possess any credible paper qualification. Neither have they undergone any teacher-training programme designed by omniscient bureaucrats. They would probably end up selling chicken rice by the roadside.

That unreflective uncritical well-fed boy who thought that going to school is for the purpose of making money only, has stayed in the mind since, like the shadow of my nemesis.

Multi-generational indoctrination

Obviously, a Chinese boy in his early teens like that could not have come to that kind of earthy street-wise perception about the purpose of education and life in general, without a great deal of prodding from his social environment.

I can only imagine how, on a daily basis, the poor kid is being brow-beaten by a whole host of well-meaning adults, parents, relatives, family friends, and some teachers, into the idea that he must study hard in order to get a good job later.

His leisure hours must be fully occupied with doing homework, or expensive private tuition in a few or all school subjects. He was probably never given a chance to enjoy his childhood, since he had no childhood to begin with.

During long weekends or school holidays, such children are taken to palatial shopping malls to indoctrinate them with the idea that the good life is the copious consumption of goods and services. Otherwise, they are taken to long trips abroad, for more shopping and more subliminal indoctrination. In either case, the young would have learnt by then that credit cards are more valuable than money, and that debt is better than capital.

Meanwhile, the stick will have to accompany the carrot to drive home the need for good grades and higher education. Chinese parents do not use the rod any more these days. Fear is a much more effective rod. They simply convey the message, through a process of socialisation and mental osmosis, that if the children do not study and work hard, they will have no rice to eat.

Those poor kids will henceforth carry the political baggage of their birth, paying for sins, which they have not committed.

By the time they have finished the difficult process of puberty, they would have been made to realise that they will not be given a government scholarship, get into a government university, find a job in the huge government bureaucracy, or receive any government assistance in any form.

Their future would be laid bare before them. They will have to find a niche in the private sector. There, they will never get any government contracts, or be able to finance their business venture through loans and other schemes sponsored by the government.

More than likely, they will have to bribe their way through the bureaucracy if they want anything done in private business. If they fail and titter on the verge of bankruptcy, the government will not spend a cent to bail them out.

Passing exams

By the time the cream of the crop enters a college or a university, in Malaysia or overseas, at great sacrifice and expense of the parents, they will have developed an excessive fixation with academic achievement in the pursuit of good grades and bankable graduation parchments.

Nay, 'academic excellence' is the wrong term. I mean they will have become examination machines par excellence, developing expertise in memorising things and regurgitating them onto test papers.

In this frenzied obsessive paper chase, everything in school activities is relegated to second place, or no place at all. Reading Shakespeare and Homer is out. It is not tested in examinations. In any case, given the present decline in education standards, any book with a vocabulary of more than 500 words would be too hard to read. That would leave glossy magazines with a lot of pictures and comic books.

Extra-curricular programmes are deemed as an unwelcome distraction from tuition classes. Sports are out, since the kids can always catch it on television anyway. Besides, they can exercise their fingers moving and clicking the mouse in front of a computer.

As for projects that will benefit the community within and outside the school, well it is fine if kids want to help other people. But who is going to help the kids when they starve or cannot get a job.

Politics, of the college or real type, is strictly forbidden, like pre-marital sex. Sometimes, for college students, pre-marital sex is more tolerated than politics among liberal parents. Is it that teenage pregnancy and abortion are more manageable problems than ISA arrest and detention for the parents at least?

Having this idea of survival at all costs driven into their impressionable minds in their most formative years, these Chinese youths would never dare dream of pursuing a career according to their heart.

Parents have come to me confessing their agony when their children have decided to be a writer, a journalist, a marine biologist, a musician, an artist, a mountain climber, or a philosopher. One chap was close to tears when his daughter wanted to be an architect, because, in his mind, architecture was not meant for girls.

Repay their debt

In then end, these kids end up in disciplines that they may be good at, but that goes against their secret dreams.

The rare ones who try to rebel would be told in no uncertain terms that they owe their parents for everything that they have, including their life. They must repay their debt to their parents according to the teaching of Confucius in what is now known as the sacred doctrine of filial piety.

It does not matter that I consider this a debased interpretation of Confucian text, because no Chinese parents would agree with me anyway.

Finally, these young people graduate, find employment of some kind, and duplicate the lifestyle and values of their father and mother, and all those ancestors before them. Then they get married, have kids of their own, and repeat the vicious cycle of confining them to the straight-jacket of survivalist existence and racial prejudices.

It is a tragedy on an epic proportion, after the fashion of Homer and Sophocles.

Why do I have to quote ancient Greeks in my narrative on the Malaysian Chinese? Well, for one thing, the idea of tragedy after the fashion of Homer and Sophocles is absent from the 5000 year old Chinese civilisation. The irony here is itself a supreme form of tragedy.