Don’t patronise our students

JUMPING on the TikTok bandwagon may sound cool to some people but it’s totally strange coming from the Higher Education Ministry. The idea of cosseting our “bored and homesick” university students who have to remain on campus during the movement control order (MCO) period with a competition on video-sharing platform TikTok is simply patronising them. Our higher education students are more capable than that.

As an academic, I feel that this kind of “encouragement” is truly unnecessary in an academic setting. And I have good reason to believe that Makcik Kiah, who has a daughter staying at a local campus, would agree with me too.

Perhaps TikTok is a thing among young people now but it is not education. In Ireland, they have writer John Boyne’s Covid-19 short story (aka isolation diaries) competition. In India, the National Innovation Foundation has opened the Challenge Covid-19 Competition to all citizens, calling for innovations beyond technological ideas related to nutrition and boosting immunity in a time of lockdown. Similarly, South Africa has the Covid-19 Idea Global Challenge, inviting university students to pitch any solutions they develop to any Covid-19-related problem to a panel of international investors and mentors. And in Malaysia, we have... a TikTok competition. We are better than this. We should be better than this.

Our education has failed our students if we think a TikTok competition is the thing to make them

#dudukdiamdiam. Our education has failed our students if our universities can only produce passive citizens who only want to escape reality by terkinja-kinja (playing around) in a video while frontliners risk their lives. Our education has failed our students if our students find themselves stuck behind walls of meaningless facts, figures and rankings, not knowing how to contribute during this critical time. Because I passionately believe that a university is not a place for education if it only fills students’ heads with useless information that they cannot use in their lives.

The education authorities, with their power and capacity, should play their role as a group of intellectuals. A society without one, as pointed out by Syed Hussein Alatas in 1977, is deprived of a certain level of consciousness and insight into vital problems.

In his 1977 book, Intellectuals In Developing Societies, he discussed the agenda to dismantle the cyclical relationship between an anti-intellectual atmosphere of “bebalisma” (narrow minded thinking) and inadequate innovation by promoting an intellectual revolution in which a scholarly environment could be promoted that would allow a stratum of thinkers to navigate society towards a better place.

Unfortunately, it’s 2020 already – should we start the revolution now?

In memory of Allahyarham Prof Datuk Dr Syed Hussein Alatas, one of our very own great intellectuals. Al-fatihah.

Dr NADILLA JAMIL

International Islamic University Malaysia