Creative and literary arts education have always been assigned the lowest priority in our education system, while science subjects (STEM – Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) are considered blue-ribbon subjects and given the utmost priority.
The non-science subjects such as History, Geography, and languages are portrayed as subservient to the sciences in terms of overall knowledge development and ranking strategy.
Such prioritisation and discrimination of knowledge are reflected in our education system, especially in institutions of higher learning, which mostly emphasise STEM.
This discriminative attitude reflects the myopia of the combined ministries’ officials and universities’ top management towards the value of different knowledge spectra.
More so, it reflects their ignorance of the value of creative and literary arts education.
The literary arts, whether drama, novels, or poetry, offer enormous educative and experiential values. They express various facets of human emotions, strengths, and weaknesses through the display of moral and ethical values.
Reading plays (dramas), for example, improves language proficiency. Acting in plays gives one the opportunity for vicarious experience of life’s trials and tribulations – its joys, sadness, frustrations, anger, jealousy, and greed – that would serve well in real-life situations when one can temper these emotions to circumscribe one’s actions for positive rather than negative outcomes.
Novels, which combine narration and dramatic expressions, relay realistic human experience as well as surrealistic and fantasy episodes. Realistic novels enhance everyday experiences to relate stories that reveal various human actions and character traits, while fantasy novels explore phenomena beyond the realistic physicality of existence, breaching the constraints of physical laws.
These novels enrich readers’ imagination, often helping them to perceive beyond the mundane reality.
Poetry is a literary form that plays with words set into various rhythmic patterns that convey incidents using linguistic articulations embedded with symbols and metaphors. It enhances textual expressions beyond the confines of the mundane into a higher plane of cognisance.
Literary works expand the dimension of the perception of knowledge into a higher level of intellectual awareness.
Unfortunately, Malaysian universities, especially the major research universities, do not consider creative literary works as befitting intellectual output for institutions of higher learning. Thus, such works do not merit publication by the universities because they are deemed a waste of the university’s financial publication allocation.
One such university requires, as a matter of policy, for its academic staff to pay for the cost of printing their creative literary works. The university further stipulates that priority is only given to manuscripts that would enhance its rankings.
The university discriminates knowledge according to ranking viability rather than on knowledge that explores and enhances the understanding of the various facets of human existence and natural phenomena. It exposes the myopic and cataract vision of Malaysian universities regarding the variety of knowledge needed to fathom the vast spectrum of human phenomenal existence as well as the mode of expressing these facets of knowledge.
Such negative attitudes towards arts education and the publication of creative/literary works are due to the ignorance of the educators and policymakers on the aesthetic and functional roles of the creative, and literary arts. Most of them have gone through life without reading a novel, play, or poem because of a lack of proficiency in understanding the linguistic nuances and inflections that use metaphor and symbolism to advance thought patterns beyond the baseline narrative language.
As a result of this official stance of prioritising STEM as core pedagogical knowledge, universities, which traditionally function as the repository and transference of knowledge that address the whole gamut of human phenomenal existence, have abandoned their role in the overall knowledge development to just focus on STEM.
Thus, what happens is that literary and creative knowledge are sidelined and labelled as non-academic and non-intellectual output, not worthy of publication, relegating them to a nondescript periphery of knowledge acquisition and application in the Malaysian Educational Blueprint.
Such ignorance is humiliating because literary works express the norms and values of human existence. And this is recognised at the highest level of excellence, the Nobel Prize, which awards the Nobel Prize for Literary works. But our universities regard such works as nondescript and of no consequence compared to the sciences.
This attitude exposes the shallowness of the policymakers and the so-called academic intellectuals who could only perceive the physicality of phenomenal existence but not those that elevate knowledge expressions beyond the superficiality of narrative discourse.
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of Twentytwo13.
