LAST Sunday it was the Seremban Half Marathon, and since I ran in the 10km category in 2014 and 2015, I felt it compulsory to do the same this year. While in past years I trained in the weeks beforehand, running progressively greater distances until race day, this time I did not practise at all, and my legs did not agree to a sudden dose of 10km – completed in a far poorer time compared to last year’s 66 minutes. The moral of the story is that training really does matter.
When I was a student at the Alice Smith School, I did a fair bit of 100m sprinting: it was the only thing I was decent at apart from badminton as I was a useless footballer and gymnast. At the opening of its secondary school sports complex (including a running track that possesses Class 2 certification from the International Association of Athletics Federations), I appreciated how my teachers 25 years ago taught me the many lessons that sport has to offer – self-belief, teamwork, and the primacy of rules that apply equally to everyone – a concept I would later recognise as the rule of law. Although the Equine Park campus did not physically exist in my time, I was struck by how it nonetheless felt like my alma mater. There was something in the values and ethos that was carried through and retained from the Jalan Bellamy campus. As the school celebrates its 70th anniversary, I wonder how much of this ethos stemmed from Alice Smith’s own values when she taught students at the original site on Jalan Eaton.
In various parts of Malaysia, I have noticed that schools often care – much more than other institutions – about their own collective memory. The displays of trophies won over the decades, the portraits of past principals, the lists of top scholars, the halls named after illustrious alumni: all these provide powerful physical reminders of the school’s journey thus far. But even more importantly, the empty shelves for upcoming trophies, the white walls where more portraits can hang, the blank boards where lists will be expanded, the blueprints for possible expansion: these are the things that motivate future excellence.
Often when I speak to alumni of some of our country’s oldest schools – many of them now under the ambit of the Ministry of Education – they lament that their once great almae matres have lost their values and ethos, and consequently they didn’t send their children there. There may be a heavy dose of rose-tinted nostalgia behind such sentiments, but when combined with international academic tests that give mixed results at best, it becomes clear that reform in our education system is much needed: and in the Malaysian public policy space today numerous proposals clamour for government attention. (Partly why, in addition to research and advocacy, Ideas has decided to be involved in the running of two educational institutions as well.)
Naturally, in their efforts to attract students and parents in the present, schools select the most attractive parts of their history: periods of bad results are glossed over and disreputable alumni are omitted from the chronicles.
It is much the same with political parties. At any given time, those in charge of them will capitalise on the relevant bits of the past to attract followers in the present. In Malaysia, it sometimes looks like there is no limit to the extent that history can be changed: perhaps the founders and early leaders of the party, if alive today, would find the parties unrecognisable apart from the name and logo. And of course, alumni who tarnish the image of the party are discredited, regardless of their contributions to electoral victory in their heyday.
But while the mission of schools is to empower individuals for the future, long after they will have left the institution, the mission of political parties in Malaysia, it seems, is to empower individuals in the present, for as long a future as possible.
There is no doubt that all institutions need to evolve over time to better deliver their mission, but if the values and ethos of an organisation – especially one that wields so much power and influence over other bodies – can be so easily manipulated by those who lead it, then it is no wonder that alumni relations are so frosty, what more when once-popular alumni form a club against it.
The adage goes that in politics, there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests. God forbid that there would be a school in Malaysia that would teach its students that the only permanent interest was themselves.
Tunku Zain Al-Abidin is founding president of Ideas.