we don't need no thought control

So, I'm about two-thirds of the way through CS Lewis' The Abolition of Man (all the editions on Amazon have pretty darn ugly covers, by the way; I like the one with a photo of some old statue bust better). I like it for the most parts except for some uneasy moments where I watch one of my favourite scholars talk about the 道 Tao extensively and then proceed to cite the Analects of Confucius in support. *sigh* Oh well, it's not that big a deal.

He's right; the education system we have now really does seem to be aiming to turn people into 'urban blockheads' for whom everything has to be utilitarian and materialistic. In Malaysia, at least there still is an explicitly religious *ahem*Islamic*ahem* component inserted into even quite secular subjects like Biology, but in the face of the gross soullessness of the rest of it, the stuff about honouring your country, having faith in God, loving nature and all that sounds like putting on a few dabs of sugar icing to con kids into eating a cake made of chalk.

What really bothers me about our schools is that they've turned education, from being a process of acquiring knowledge and skills, into an end in itself. From the complaints I read on blogs and in the news, high school and college graduates really haven't learned any real-life skills in school (check out Michael Ooi's blog for some examples of greenhorns who not only have no job skills, but also no common sense). From age seven to seventeen (or the mid-twenties, for those of us fortunate enough to go to college) your socially assigned goal in life is to pass exams. Of course new graduates are complete morons when it comes to real life.

The other disturbing thing is what Lewis points out, that the type of system that was becoming established in England in the mid-twentieth century - not so different from our own now, probably - produces what he calls Men Without Chests, that is, people out of whom the higher feelings have been brainwashed, because the chest is the part between the brain, which symbolizes pure intellect, and the gut, which symbolizes biological drives and emotions. (I thought this chapter title was very funny for a long time because there was a long hiatus between the time I started reading the book and my reaching the end of the first chapter where he explains this). I'm not gonna repeat his arguments; go read the book if you can deal with his prose. I sort of like it because trying to disentangle his writing is like doing a literary brain-teaser puzzle.

Anyway, this one quotation in particular I like:

In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

Means we're the generation whose brains have no balls...no kidding.

For the most part, the only way in which Malaysian public education is fulfilling its intended purpose is by being so stultifying that it filters out the blockheads who can't get through the mental walls created by eleven years of that crap, and only allowing the truly bright to punch through.

I count myself among the latter, but I can't take credit for it. I have good parents. When they die we'll be fighting over books, not money; but I'd rather be rich in those anyway. It's a better inheritance.