DID you read the outrageously great news that more Malaysians evidently read last year than in 2009?
The news has to be true as it came from no less than the Deputy Information, Communication and Culture Minister.
He is indeed quoted in the news report as having said that not only were more books borrowed from the National Library last year, but that there was also an increase of 1.3 per cent in the National Library’s registered members.
From this, it was concluded that more Malaysians read last year.
Of course, one could rightly quibble with such crude statistics and, indeed, such crude over-generalisation of said statistics.
But not me.
It could have been all those painful years of menurut perintah as an Aku Janji civil servant. It certainly could have been because, as always, there was nothing on TV then beyond the endless repeats.
Whatever it was, I instead decided to add to the esteemed deputy minister’s dubious statistics by pulling out the nearest book I could lay my hands on, determined to spend some time reading it.
Unfortunately – and this could also be a sad indicator of the lack of reading material in my household – the book that I pulled out just happened to be my son’s Tingkatan 4 History textbook.
Not exactly deep, literary stuff, I must admit, not even chick lit.
But, given the recent, ongoing – but now, sadly dissipating – debate about History being made a compulsory subject for SPM and the contents of the History textbooks, I thought I’d give the book a once over, just to see what the fuss is all about.
The book, ‘Sejarah Tingkatan 4: Buku Teks’ is written by four Malay Malaysian academics, each with a PhD to boot, although, I hasten to add, after a couple of decades in academia, that really isn’t saying very much.
Be that as it may, flipping through the introductory comments, I discovered that, in the process of getting this book together, these guys (and a gal) had ‘taken the initiative’ to travel to faraway places such as Jordan, Egypt, Turkey and Spain.
Evidently no expense was spared – hopefully their expense and not the taxpayers’ — to enable the gathering of primary data for this Form 4 History textbook. Clearly a sign that we are fast becoming a high-income country, don’t you think?
Or that AirAsia had special rates to these places.
I’m sure they could have done just as well by visiting the well-stocked libraries of Universiti Malaya, UKM and, a little further up north, USM.
But I guess nothing beats studying up close and personal the pyramids and sphinxes in Egypt, the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, the Umm Qais and Pella ruins in Jordan and the Alhambra palace in Granada.
Ah, if only our Form 4 kids were as fortunate.
But I digress.
The book is made up of 10 chapters, the first two being fairly straightforward discussions on the nature and actual emergence of civilisations.
It is in the third chapter that particular references to religion are made, with 10 pages being devoted to the impact of Hinduism and Buddhism on government and administration in the region. All pretty standard and not too deep, given that this is a text for 16-year-olds.
It is after this that the whole text began to overwhelm me, because what follows are five intense chapters (Chapter 4 to Chapter 8) on the emergence of Islam and its spread to this region.
And, finally, the book winds down with two chapters, one on the history of Europe (wow!) and the spread of imperialism, followed by the final chapter on British imperial policy and its impact on our economy.
All in, I calculated that these five chapters (out of 10) on Islam made up 43 per cent of the contents of the book, if we exclude the glossary, references and index.
Which is all fine, I guess, although the nagging question is: what happened to appropriateness, and balance even?
I remember the History lessons I had as a school kid, which alerted many of us then to the contexts within which this multi-ethnic country, indeed this multi-ethnic region, developed. The History lessons then, indeed the syllabus right through to Form 5, seemed to focus on forging understanding, building bridges.
I’m not so sure any more, going by what I read from this textbook.
It’s all good stuff, I’m sure, these current morsels they are now feeding our kids and forcing them to memorise and pass in order to get their SPM.
Good stuff as long as we take heed of TS Eliot’s comment that “history has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues”.
Well-meaning missionaries may point out to me that their – and our – main role in life, to put it crudely, is to convert.
But I am sure there are other, more pleasant and less desperate, ways of doing that than in our school History books.
Indeed, I suspect that serving up too much of a ‘good thing’ to multi-ethnic, multi-religious groups of students can be a bit of a problematic strategy, don’t you think?
Zaharom Nain can be contacted via [email protected]