To a certain extent I believe it wouldn’t be incorrect to say that reading is just not in our culture. We don’t buy and read books like, say, we watch TV. Having said that, it does seem to me that reading is gaining popularity among teenagers, albeit slowly. But then again, maybe it’s just me. Truth is, I don’t have any reliable mechanism to gauge how often people around my age read these days, how many books and what kind of book that we read. I conducted a several-question survey some time ago asking exactly these questions. Even though I would admit that the survey was nowhere representative of the population, the result wasn’t very promising.

Generally, most of us are divided into three groups: those that read mainly fictions, those that read mainly non-fictions, and those that reads nothing else than their course textbooks and revision notes.

When I first started reading books several hundreds page long, they were all fictions. That was when I was in secondary school, and my primary reason for reading was to improve my English, which I did, apart from for fun, of course. As my English reading and writing skills gradually improve, I no longer read to improve my English, but rather, for fun. It was like watching TV, only those fiction novels provided much greater detail, most of the times for better, and sometimes for worse. During those days, I didn’t usually buy the books myself – heck, I don’t have the money. So I tend to read the books my sister bought, and because my sister didn’t only buy fiction books, so it was natural that when boredom took over and I’ve exhausted all the fiction books, I decided to pick up that inch-thick non-fiction book and took it for a ride.

Of course, it took me quite some time to finish it. Non-fiction book doesn’t have all the plot twists and turns and suspense that make fiction books so interesting. Heck, they rarely even have plots. “There’s no dialogue at all”, to quote my younger sister. A lot of people would dismiss it as mundane, and boring, and so they stick to fiction books. But somehow I got interested. After all those fiction books that I’ve read, after all those exciting stories and tales and, well, fictions, I was attracted to non-fictions. There was something more to those books, something more substantial. The stories in the non-fiction books tell a lot more than just tales for entertainment. Here was a book filled with real-world knowledge, knowledge that I can instantly apply and relate to the real world.

Of course, when people encourage you to read, they don’t mean go and read Harry Potter. When people say “you must make reading a culture”, they don’t mean to go and start collecting the entire The Lord of The Rings and related series. We all know this, whether we’d like to admit it or not. We all realise this. Reading fictions don’t give us much benefit, apart from improving our comprehension skills. When we’re already good with English, reading fictions becomes nothing more like watching TV: passive entertainment. Except that it does seem better. Nobody would scream at you for wasting your time reading book. In fact, you might even get a few compliments.

Of course, this is not to say that we shouldn’t read fictions at all. As long as we’re human, we’re gonna need some entertainment, and there’s nothing wrong with a few good fictions now and then. I occasionally enjoy a good thriller novel, like those by Matthew Reilly, and of course The Lord of the Rings trilogy was a classic favourite. But we have to get a move on. We have to start reading for real knowledge. We have to start reading for effect.

I know, the transition wouldn’t be easy. Many non-fiction books are simply too boring or inaccessible to most of us laymen, especially when we’re just getting to know non-fictions. But once we find a secure footing and get more and more comfortable with the notion of reading non-fiction books, more and more of those books will become accessible to us. Realising that it can sometimes be a daunting task to find a good readable non-fiction books, here are a few suggestions of books that had been kind to me in my early days of reading non-fiction:

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
2. The World is Flat, by Thomas L. Friedman
3. Tuesdays with Morrie, by Mitch Albom
4. The Google Story, by David A. Vise

There are also many fiction books that have substance. The plots may have been fictitious, but they usually revolve around things that touches our very conscience, and invite us to think about things that we don’t normally give any thought about. These fiction novels will also make a good and beneficial reading. Try and look up authors such as Nick Hornby, Lionel Shriver, and Jodi Picoult.

A few days ago I went to visit my former teachers in Sri KDU, and had a good chat with Mr Masukor. At one point in the middle of an interesting talk regarding boarding school, he told me that one of his student told him that she has never known any Chinese friends before. Then he also told me that a parent of one of the Chinese student expressed her concern of having her son to stay in the same house with Malay kids, citing that her son have never known any Malay friends before. And yet we boast about being a multiracial country, that our cultural diversity is our strength, that our racial harmony is something to be proud of.

But in reality, though we live side by side, we don’t live with each other. Our racial harmony may well be a by-product of ignorance, of not caring what the other races are doing, of non-interfering and very little interaction with each other, limited to only the occasional meeting in taxis and sundry shops and checkout lanes, where even then we barely talk to each other. This is certainly nothing to be proud of. Instead of the individual races being interwoven with each other to create the very fabric of our multiracial society, it is more like separate strands of ropes that don’t even touch.

Why is this so? I believe that in part – a huge part – our education system is to blame for. For any kids, schools are the best place for them to make friends. Many of us live in a racially clustered society – the Malays live where most (if not all) of the neighbours are Malays, and the same goes for the Chinese and Indians. The only place we can really bring our kids together is at school. And yet the Chinese and Indians send their kids to vernacular schools, where the other races make up of maybe less than 5% of the population. The Malays send their sons and daughters to boarding schools, where again less than 5% of the population are of the other races. In fact, in many boarding schools, there are no Chinese or Indian students at all. Little wonder then when these Malay kids and Chinese kids and Indian kids finish school and join the larger Malaysian society, they don’t know how to react with the reality of our social fabric.

I should know this. I’ve been in boarding school since I was 13. But I had a tad more luck than many of my friends. Right after I finished SPM (and my 5 years of non-interaction with friends of other races), I did my pre-university education in a private school in Kota Damansara. Of course, due to the generally less-financially-capable Malays, it was mainly the Chinese that send their kids to the school. But due to Petronas sending its scholars to this school, it’s International Baccalaureate community is rather balanced between the races. And this close interaction with the other Chinese and Indian friends forced me to really rethink my perception towards the other races in Malaysia. After years and years of living in a closed society – living alongside my own kind – this was not easy to do. I revolted. But in time, I learned to accept our differences. In time, I understood them better.

It is an inevitable consequence that without interaction, there can be no understanding, and without understanding comes all sorts of hostility and anxiety. Conscious racial harmony is simply not possible, for how can you really accept living with other people when really, you don’t even know them. Many of my friends continued their study in boarding colleges where again, very little of the population are made up of other races than Malay. I pity them, and I wonder how they’ll turn out when they leave the education world and enter the working world.

Fixing this is not easy. There have to be a major rethinking of our national education system. The Chinese and Indians would have to give up vernacular schools. The Malays have to give up boarding schools. The national schools structure have to be revamped to include the Mandarin and Tamil languages that the Chinese and Indians will surely want their children to retain. The Malays have to recognise that quality education can exist in the national schools, especially if the boarding schools no longer drain the good brains from all these national schools. These are but a tiny portion of what have to be thought and discussed about. But if we are to have a truly multiracial Malaysia where we really live with each other, not just alongside each other, somewhere along the line it has to be done. The individual racial strings can only go their separate ways for so long before they intermingle in a tight knot, and I’m sure none of us would want that.

During secondary school, debate competitions were not really my favourite. Even though I did join quite a number of them including representing my school once, I never really liked them. Yes, they’re mostly entertaining especially to the audience as we get to watch lots of verbal attacks and counter-attacks between any two debating teams. Some are down right hilarious, while others can be plain boring. But most of the time, it’s entertaining to watch. Where else can you get that much amount of sarcasm?

But now that I think about it, I knew back then why I didn’t quite like those debate competitions. There’s a major flaw in the way those debate competitions are conducted, one that I believe deserves quite a serious attention.

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Everyone thinks; it is our nature to do so. But much of our thinking, left to itself, is biased, distorted, partial, uninformed or down-right prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and that of what we produce, make, or build depends precisely on the quality of our thought. Shoddy thinking is costly, both in money and in quality of life. Excellence in thought, however, must be systematically cultivated. — Scriven and Paul

Just ten years ago, everybody aspires to be a University student, every parent will be damn proud if their kids got into any university, even more proud if it’s an overseas university. Ten years ago, people regard university graduates highly, and they can find and secure jobs fairly easily. Ten years ago, university is the place every primary and secondary school students aspire to be in several years into the future.

But that was 10 years ago. That was during the time when we don’t have as much as (reportedly) 80,000 unemployed university graduates. Back then, parents hope you can finish your studies and obtain that degree. But not today. Today you are expected to get into university, and you are expected to finish your study, and you are expected to get that undergraduate degree, whatever degree that is. Anything less would be undesirable. This has become a normal scenario, and people no longer regards university graduates as highly as they used to. Why? Because back then we don’t have as many university graduates. Today, they’re commonplace. It’s only a nature’s law that people value rare and precious things (though university graduates are not exactly ‘things’, but you get the idea).

Is this a bad thing? Absolutely not. The fact that university graduates are commonplace and people don’t regard them as highly as they used to indicates one clear thing, among others: we as a nation have succeeded in raising our standard of knowledge. Collectively, we can regard our nation’s citizen (or young citizens, at least) as academically learned. This is certainly good for the country. After all, this is what education is for: raising a learned society.

The question now is, where do we go from here? Keep producing more and more university graduates? Certainly. We have to sustain that, or we’ll revert back to a less-learned society. But, is that all? One thing is clear (and becoming clearer by the day) is that we can no longer just keep producing university graduates. We must proceed to the next step if we wish to continue developing the country. And what’s that next step?

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