COMMENT From the time of the Mahathir era the Umno general assembly has become an annual rite of passage aimed at sustaining two myths: one, the myth of the party’s origins; and two, the myth of the party’s mission.

The first myth of Umno as the original protector of the Malay people vanished in a maze of appropriation by special interests; the second myth is being sustained as camouflage for the disappearance of the first.

How seriously the party views the need to hide the first myth’s evanescence can be gauged from the announcement of the Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin that the subject of Malaysian history is to come in for tinkering.

The announcement was not calculated to assuage critics who feel the national education system has deteriorated into a vast wasteland, producing many graduates who are simply not employable - the civil service having become their convenient dumping ground.

Why do you think the composition of the civil service has climbed back to 1.2 million after the spate of privatisation in the 1980s had reduced the number to 800,000?   

Muhyiddin, the most political occupant of the ministry since Sarawak’s Rahman Yaakob briefly assayed the role in the late 1960s, is just the person people who believe that education is too serious a matter to be left to politicians, would not want in the role of minister, leave alone history content decider.

But there he was announcing at the conclusion of the Umno general assembly that history is to be made compulsory at the school-leaving level and the parts about Malaysian history to do with the constitution, especially Article 153 pertaining to Malay rights, would be reformulated, presumably, to reinforce a point of view.

Official dogmatism

Bad enough our system is in thrall to the ends which those who control the state seek to advance; now parts of Malaysian history are in for further subjection to official dogmatism.

We ought to be glad that there is the Internet: somewhere in its democratic anarchy, the truth of falsity of things can be inferred. So designs on the history content as composed by Muhyiddin’s cohort that is less the honourable are certain to be given short shrift.

Perhaps the time has come to insulate the education ministry from the picky hands of politicians. Former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad attempted a version of this by placing the bland Dr Sulaiman Daud, also of Sarawak but much different to Rahman Yaakob, in the post for some years in the 1980s.

But the portfolio was and continues to be highly vulnerable to the pressures of the dominant political party, and for that reason, could not be kept from becoming an Umno preserve.

Perhaps when and if Pakatan Rakyat takes over the federal government, the education portfolio – certain to become the most significant role in the coalition’s programme of rebuilding the Malaysian polity – would have to be left to a person of olympian detachment and erudition, if one is found.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.