I FIRST wrote about my alma mater, Penang Free School, in this newspaper in August of 2007. Next month, on Oct 21, the first school “east of Suez” will be 200 years old. Much has been written on its origins and ethos.
The school’s Historical Society website describes it as “the oldest English School in Malaysia and the Southeast Asia region”. Both the chairman of the school’s board of governors and Bicentenary Committee chairman also described the school in the same way.
But “east of Suez”, which has been echoing in me since I stepped into the school portals in 1970, has many connotations — one of which is that Penang supersedes India. Such an institution was absent there, and elsewhere in Asia.
But in the first three decades of the 1800s, there was a heated debate over education policy in India. Some believed that education should be in Indian languages, and also in Sanskrit and Persian; and others believed that traditional India had nothing to teach regarding modern skills.
Meanwhile, in Penang, it was said that idea behind Penang Free School originated from the charter on the establishment of Prince of Wales Island, the short-lived name for the island.
It says: “That it will be the first object of the Institution to provide for the Education of such children as would be otherwise, brought up in idleness and consequent vice, and without any means of obtaining instruction either in useful learning or in any manual employment, and to implant in them in the early habits of industry, order and a good conduct.”
And subsequently Rev. R.S. Hutchings, Chaplain of the Presidency, petitioned a “Free School”. Hutchings and his school were children of the European Enlightenment.
Some of the wordings and meaning of the charter would later find their way to India, through the introduction of English education there. T.B. Macaulay (1800-1859), British historian and Whig politician, played a major role in introducing English and Western concepts to education in India.
In 1835, 19 years after Hutchings established Penang Free School, Macaulay called for a reform of secondary education in India, where “useful learning” — synonymous with Western culture — be taught. Benthamian (from Utalitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham) ideas were contemporaneous.
Education must be along utilitarian lines. Macaulay argued that: “We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language.”
What Macaulay had in mind was the creation of a class of Anglicised Indians who serve. From Hutchings, Penang Free School and Macaulay, we see the process of inheriting colonialism.
What Macaulay wrote reflected a conscious initiative at limiting the universe of thought and discourse to the unsuspecting local population under the premises of equality, egalitarianism and universalism — some of the features of the European Enlightenment earlier planted on Penang soil.
The alumni are all products of that conscious effort founded more than two centuries ago.
If we frame education as indoctrination, then I am quite sure, Western (European Enlightenment) education has fairly blocked the search for alternatives.
We, like other education streams in the country (religious, vernacular, etc.) are worlds apart.
Our ethos and worldviews exist independent of each other, sometimes hostile but, most of the time, ignorant of one another.
Tolerance is maybe its hallmark. And our imaginations of one another are limited.
But, at the same time, we are not expected to be critical of the system and values that have nurtured us.
The Hutchings-Macaulay assumption of education instantly rejects all critiques of Western institutions from non-Western sources — assumed to be non-existent in the first place. It would accuse such critiques as “nationalistic”, “illiberal” or “racist”, especially when it comes from within the national society.
That it effectively blocks out thought and arguments critical of European civilisation (unless it comes from Westerners themselves) only shows that the Enlightenment has not been liberal on its assumption of liberalism, and individual liberty.
The ethos develops a prejudice if it does not conform to the values and framework of the civilisation that has created it.
My Penang Free School years and the preceding primary education at Francis Light School have not done justice to my “native” psyche.
And I write from the interstices of an Other.
I remember the mood and attitude among the Tanjong/Penang community (teachers and parents) towards Bahasa Melayu and Malay culture — the subject, the practice and the text. The Malay narrative was anathema to Western reasoning and rationality.
That was recent history — in how the colonial process has structured our souls. It has, to many of us I suppose, created a false history of ourselves within us.
To cite an example, in our formative years, we reflected that Malay history could not be beyond 500 years. Before Malacca, the Melayu did not exist. And many still believe that is so.
Our — Asians and non-westerners — past was made limited by the likes of Hutchings and Macaulay, and later reinforced by Winstedt and Wilkinson.
What has resonated is the rejection of nationhood by Western liberal education. It is a tragedy when we are alienated from ourselves and from our past.
Penang Free School had wanted to make us Anglophiles — white men in brown masks. Old Frees, we indeed are.
In the early 1970s, books in the spirit of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and Charles Dicken’s David Copperfield abound in the Penang Free School library, Khutub Khanah. In our consciousness, we have to make good on what we trust. The past is our future.
Happy 200th anniversary, Penang Free School.