Pusaka founder and director Eddin Khoo, responding to remarks made by a professor at UTM’s Centre for Biomedical Engineering, said Malaysia would have more innovators only if society is encouraged to cultivate the creative and imaginative faculties of the people, especially the young.
The UTM professor, Sheikh Hussain Salleh, said in a recent interview with FMT that Malaysia had failed to produce innovators despite the high quality of engineering education in the country. He attributed this to the lack of a will to invent.
Khoo said Malaysians were turning themselves into a nation of followers through an education system that emphasised examination results. He associated this to a fear of rebellion. Imaginative and creative people were often seen as potential rebels, he said.
“We don’t liberate minds because we consider it dangerous,” he told FMT. “We have a total under-appreciation of creativity and imagination.
“Imaginative and creative people are naturally disruptive and what they create in a society is creative tension, and they will not be followers, whereas the student who gets 20 distinctions in an examination may have just basically vomited out what he has been told to say.”
He said the foundation of any creative society was freedom.
“If you have no freedom and, worse still, if you fear freedom, you’re never going to have an imaginative and creative society. You can have all the arts in the world, but these won’t necessarily make you imaginative and creative. You can be followers even in art.”
He said this lack of imagination and creativity was very much in evidence and the evidence itself was contributing to the problem.
“We are influenced by a culture of bad taste. Look at the way all our official announcements are made with all those ugly cursive writing and multicoloured backdrops.
“Things that surround us, if they are ugly and kitschy, then the people are affected by that subliminally and we’ll have a lot more of that stuff.
“We don’t understand space, we don’t understand nuance, we don’t understand texture, and this is very disheartening because we are an Asian civilization and Asian civilizations have always understood these greatly nuanced things.”
He said the cultivation of imagination and creativity had to start at home.
“The home has to be conducive to imaginative thinking. Sometimes the parents don’t even need to cultivate it. They just need to leave a creative child alone. Don’t oppress or suppress the child. You don’t need to support it, necessarily, but don’t suppress the child.”
Secondly, he said, teachers must do their part in the classrooms.
“Education is a very complicated and complex thing. A teacher in a classroom must be able to identify the individual talent of every single student. That is how you begin to cultivate creativity.
“There may be students who are better in technocratic things. That’s perfectly fine. We need them too.”