Finding the right balance

Professor Tan Sri Dato' Dzulkifli Abdul Razak
My View - The Sun Daily
February 3, 2016

AT THE launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (2016-2030) in New York, in September last year, the prime minister expressed concern over the imbalanced global progress with millions of people still suffering.

"Even today, around 800 million people live in poverty and suffer from hunger," he was reported as saying.

"This, then, must remain at the core of the post-2015 development agenda – an imperative one that leaves no one behind," he said.

He affirmed that Malaysia is committed to the post-2015 agenda "in transforming the world by 2030, as inclusivity and sustainable development had long been at the centre of the country's transformation from a developing country to one that has achieved high-income status by 2020".

In fact, the prime minister while tabling the launch of the 11th Malaysia Plan (11MP) in May last year, envisaged a more lofty ambition.

He was quoted as saying, "In my opinion, we need to build a holistic civilisation in which society has high values, good morals, enjoys reading, has a thirst for knowledge, appreciates culture and heritage as well as possesses a first class mentality."

The suggestion that "we need to build a holistic civilisation" is enough to open up a host of new grand challenges for post-2020 Malaysia.

Indeed this is the level of discourse that the Sustainable Development Goals are posing today under the theme "The World We Want".

In the 11MP what we want seemed to be framed within the six thrusts of 11MP namely inclusivity, people's well-being, human capital, green development, infrastructure as well as innovation and productivity.

This column raised the question "What is the 'soul' of 11MP?" then (My View, June 10). It is anxious to find out as we move up the value chain as framed by the many abbreviations of GDP, GNI, KPI, EPP, and more recently GST, are we also moving up the values- or virtues-chain.

To be sure, none of the above abbreviations and measures really matter if "high values, good morals" continue to be sidelined.

Or otherwise remain only secondary to the economic imperatives as evident from the 10 "achievements" cited in the 11MP parliamentary speech (paras 20-30).

Thus by 2030, it is envisaged that Malaysia with a population of about 36 million will have GDP of RM2.6 trillion.

What would the Corruption Perceptions Index be by then is not indicated. Will it have slipped further as reflected by the recently released result, purportedly due to the several possible events linked to the loss of values and morals leading to rampant corrupt practices.

Such a loss, no doubt, is one of the more pertinent factors causing the "imbalanced" progress, not just globally, but beginning locally.

This is mirrored in the 2007 MACC survey where segments of Malaysian students and youngsters showed ambivalent attitude towards behaviours in relation to corruption.

Juxtaposing this with the world of education, it cannot be helped to discern similar "imbalances" too existed vis-à-vis what Unesco regards as "holistic approach to education and learning that overcomes the traditional dichotomies between cognitive, emotional and ethical aspects."

It entails that the pursuit of education is not just confined to the "measured and measurables" (as presently entrenched) at the expense of what is deemed as "soft" knowledge which is often relegated to the margin.

The case in point: while it is noteworthy that the six student aspirations as spelt out in the Blueprint took into consideration "ethics and spirituality" as one of the dimensions that need to be nurtured as recognised in the National Education Philosophy (NEP).

Yet it is the least "developed" area so far as compared to the other four dimensions. The same could be said about "national identity" as the sixth student aspiration.

Already the semblance of the triumph of imbalance is beginning to set in undermining the envisaged holistic transformation of education itself.

More significantly, research indicates that "the Western philosophical tradition has accustomed us to distinguishing and separating the mind from the body, the cognitive processes (the reason) from the emotions (the passions), even though it could be more appropriate to try to explore and understand their interrelationships, that is, the emotional nature of cognitive processes and cognitive nature of emotions.

In fact, I would further suggest that we have been handicapped by the false dichotomy that the mind and the heart/soul as unrelated/unconnected seats of the intellect leading to an even deeper "dichotomies" referred to by Unesco.

This implies that the challenge of narrowing, if not eliminating, such dichotomies/imbalances must be undertaken in earnest not least through a more holistic approach to education.

The higher purpose is to avoid education being reduced to solely the instructional process for the limited aim of "human capital" development – a concept alien to NEP, sans the balance and harmony of being human in shaping post-2020 Malaysia.

With some four decades of experience in education locally and internationally, the writer believes that "another world is possible".