"Education aims at independence of judgement. Propaganda offers ready-made opinion for the unthinking herd."
THEMALAYPRESS - FIKIR DENGAN KRITIS | TERUS MELANGKAH LEBIH JAUH.

Assalamu'alaikum wbt dan salam sejahtera. Terima kasih kepada para pembaca yang masih setia mengikuti blog ini!
~ MOHAB (Blog layout versi 1 September 2014 - 17.07.2014 - 19 Ramadhan 1435)

Khamis, Disember 24, 2009

Tin kosong menduga akal?

5 comments
Rambut sama hitam, hati dan fikiran lain-lain. Sebegitu jugalah dengan pandangan dan akal. Setiap individu mempunyai tanggapan dan tafsiran tersendiri terhadap setiap perkara yang ditayang didepan mata. Dan tafsiran itu selalunya berdasarkan pengalaman hidup masing-masing, atas peristiwa yang telah atau sedang dilalui, terletak juga pada pengamatan dan tidak kurang juga berkait dengan ilmu.

Akan tetapi, ada tetapinya, walaupun telah dimasukkan akal oleh Allah taala, tetaplah juga ada yang semberono, membuta tuli meletakkan akal dikepala lutut. Lumrah, manusia sebegitulah yang mewarnai dan menambah rencah kehidupan kita didunia ini. "Hukum betul ajelah," kata Tok Alim.

Namun yang pastinya, pandangan dan pendapat itu kita sendirilah yang punya, tapi tetap boleh dikongsi-kongsi, kata orang 'berkongsi pandangan'. Maka dengan itu sebab, saja TMP masukkan gambar ini bagi mendapat input pembaca sendiri. Apa maksud yang ter-cerita atau tersirat disebalik gambar ini?

Harap mendapat maklumbalas - sila klik pada gambar untuk besarkan.




Bukan nak menggoda tapi nak mendoga :-)

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Selasa, Disember 22, 2009

EDUCATIONAL MISSION NEEDED

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I like the sentence I bold.

Copied from:

Azly Rahman


"To evolve into wiser individuals with enquiring minds, we must ask questions and reflect upon the answers suggested to us. If we are afraid to ask questions, our mind and consciousness will be owned and manipulated by those who think they have the right answers, or by those who wants to use force to tell us what the right answers shall be." – My thoughts on the nature of learning "I currently firmly believe that education should first be a dialectical and dialogical tool to mediate and resolve the contradictions between Existentialism and Cyberneticism, and of Cultures of Disabilities, ...and next be a Deconstructive-Reconstructivist tool and social force to engineer personal and social revolutions and progress towards the realisation of a personal republic of virtue, ethics, multiculturalism, and metaphysics; so that human beings endowed with the Natural Rights to be free may collectively become educated to rise above hegemony, domination, and oppression and in the final analysis, journey towards a Pastoral and Natural self ." - My personal philosophy of teaching

I have some ideas on how we can evolve out of this current political quagmire and focus our attention to an ever-pressing national question: how best to educate the children of our nation.

We need to have the states governed by Pakatan Rakyat to experiment with a new paradigm of educational reform. To showcase what "human capital revolution", "education across the life span" and "education for creative and critical consciousness" means.

Not only to showcase one but to have a continuous improvement plan that uses data-driven and sociologically reflective techniques to engineer, nurture, and sustain such changes until education becomes the only means to educate the child to become a thinking, feeling, and reflecting human being skilled to live in harmony with people of different races and consistently exploring the power to transform the self.

In other words, we need to interrogate our educational practices and see if indeed the one that is engineered by the current regime of Barisan Nasional is effective.

We can embark upon a longitudinal comparative study – which states will progress better with a different set of idea of what education ought to be. The Yellow states of Pakatan Rakyat and the Blue states of Barisan Nasional can each be given five years to showcase improvement. We need to give them only these concepts to work on: "nature of the human beings", "nature of the human mind", "nature of learning and teaching", "nature of change", "nature of intellectual freedom", "nurture of human intelligence", "nurture of multiculturalism", and "nurture of class consciousness".

Game on

Let educational philosophers and planners and practitioners form each camp design their long-term strategies and pull together their experts and their resources.

The ultimate goal after five years is to do this: which states will have the least drop-outs, least at-risk youths, least youths incarcerated, most globally-minded, most employable graduates, and more intelligent, more world-wise, and more emphatic leaders in society.

Which states would have the best teachers with the best teaching skills and strategies, most engaged students, most creative classroom, most frequent integration of project-based learning strategies, most innovative assessment strategies, most inquisitive students, happiest learners, most-mentally resilient and gung-ho graduates, and most internationally-recognized awards?

Which states would still have the most unmotivated teachers, most vandalised schools, most neglected students, most number of daily truancy cases, most absent teachers, most stratified schools districts, most wasted class periods, most under-funded schools, most number of tuition classes, most frequent interference of politicians who do not have any business interrupting schools, most mentally lethargic learners, and most unmotivated and unskilled graduates who still need to be coached during job interviews?

That would be a good experiment in human and social transformation.

We need an independent body of researchers to report on the state of educational improvement in these two set of states – the Yellow and the Blue states. The winner of the game will get to take over the entire operation of the Ministry of Education as well as the Ministry of Higher Education.

The winner will get to set up another ministry – The Ministry of Human Intelligence, fashioned after Venezuela's, to look into education in the most comprehensive sense of its definition. We need benchmarks of success; those that would reflect national and international standards of excellence, equity, and empathy in education.

These standards need to be met cumulatively and progressively, pegged meaningfully and authentically to SMART national and international standards.

Point-of-no-return

The current state of education in Malaysia, after fifty years of independence, lacks the excellence and the rigour, the political will to recognise equity and equal opportunity, and lack of empathy in looking at the class divisions forming in the process of schooling. It is slow in restructuring society based on the alleviation of poverty regardless of race.

It has failed in its commitment to instill the spirit of Muhibbah; a concept the current government had asked children to sing to in the early 1970s. It is in fact using more sophisticated ways to divide and rule society so that the hegemony of race-based politics will continue to become a status quo.

We are at a critical stage of "point-of-no-return" in education; our conveyor belt of nationalistic-tribalistic education philosophy guised under the name of "educational progress", is going haywire, sending our batch-processed children off tangent in this Rostowian ideology of educational progress. What a waste of talent and human capital. Instead of turning them into lotuses of learners that bloom, we are making them bricks in the wall.

But first things first, as Steven Covey would say.

Let us first commission a new study of drop-out/keciciran, using good qualitative and quantitative data next and find strategies to deal with it. Our nation is actually in danger of a major human development crisis, compounded by the current oil and food crisis.

The revolution of March 8 needs a new means to sustain a good idea for human development and social change. It has the potential of political, cultural, and educational renewal. We Malaysians must all rise beyond the current pre-September 16 national-political crisis that is imploding and exploding multi-directionally against the backdrop of a world that is perpetually in crisis.

Winning children

But this proposed game of Yellow-Blue educational reform is not about creating and projecting an image alone. It is about our fear for our children's future. It is about our passion in education and how one can learn from educational practices worldwide.

I believe talents are wasted.

There are solutions that this current regime has not yet discovered. Our goal is to see children of ALL races progress. That's what any religion and humanistic philosophy teaches. Whatever success one's own children have achieved, that success formula MUST be applied to the children of others, especially of the poor.

That's what a good philosophy of education should mean to us. We cannot discriminate any child; at all levels of his/her development. The mind is too precious to be under the control of the ignorant, the arrogant, and the xenophobic.

Perhaps the state of Selangor as the most progressive state can show us the way forward in education; and the fruits of success shared with others. It can even be a hub for top notch and quality education that will link its institutions with top notch programs, institutes, and colleges worldwide.

Perhaps this state can be spearhead the radical reform and see an intellectually sustainable culture emerging. Perhaps Selangor's state university UNISEL (Universiti Industri Selangor) can be the impetus for change; spearheading comprehensive reforms at all levels.

The Barisan Nasional government has its own idea of what Malaysian education should look like; an idea closely tied to communal/race-based politics and the obsession with mind-control, obedience, and the lessening of critical thinking. It has its own competent Vice Chancellors that are working hard to have their institutions reach world-class status.

But looking at things from a collaborative point of view, perhaps these two ideologies in education (the yellow-blue ideological-dichotomy) can one day be dissolved when the experiment's over. Ultimately bi-partisan thinking should govern educational change. Ultimately in education, philosophy will triumph over politics.

When must we then embark upon this game of education – the race for excellence, equity, and empathy in education? It must be a game in which every child must come out a winner.
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Jumaat, Disember 18, 2009

Tahniah Malaysia!

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Akhirnya setelah 20 tahun kemarau emas di sukan SEA, skuad bolasepak Malaysia berjaya menebus maruah. Tahniah dan syabas buat pemain serta jurulatih yang tidak mengenal erti putus asa. Harapan kembali menyinari. Tahniah Malaysia!
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Rabu, Disember 16, 2009

Cerita Aneh dan Ajaib mengikut pendapat Tok Alim

1 comments

Di dalam banyak kisah yang telah disampaikan, memang diceritakan barang yang aneh dan ajaib, juga barang-barang yang ghaib, yang pernah terjadi dan yang akan terjadi, yang akan dialami oleh umat manusia. Seperti datangnya Imam Mahdi, tentang turunnya Nabi Isa, Ya'juj dan Ma'juj, Dabbatul-Ardhi dan lain-lain seperti yang telah diceritakan dalam risalah-risalah lama. Ini ada tertulis dalam kitab-kitab dan naskhah lama yang dikarang ratusan tahun, ditulis oleh ulama-ulama zaman dahulu dan kemudian disalin dari bahasa Arab ke dalam bahasa Melayu oleh Ulama-ulama kita dizaman itu. Mengikut pendapat Tok Alim ini lagi ULAMA itu adalah UTAMA. Tidak mungkin keterangan-keterangan itu dibuat-buat atau suatu dongengan yang dikarang-karang sahaja oleh mereka.

Sebab, kalau keterangan yang semacam itu dilayarkan atas khayalan semata, dikarang pula oleh ulama dizaman itu untuk mengabui pandangan kita umat Islam sekarang ini, MAKA BERDOSALAH mereka itu. Dan diyakini itu bukanlah tujuannya. Mereka adalah orang yang bertakwa.

Memang benar, kalau kita baca keterangan atau cerita-cerita yang telah dikisahkan adalah seperti kisah 1001 malam, seperti tentang patung manusia untuk manusia raksaksa dan keturunannya Ya'juj dan Ma juj,akan tetapi kalau kita ukur dengan akal fikiran kita dan bukan satu barang mustahil. Karena hal itu adalah yang ghaib yang dapat dipercaya oleh iman dan akal.

Seperti firman Allah taala dalam Al Quran Surah Al Baqarah:


"Orang yang takwa itu beriman dengan barang yang ghaib"

"Bagaimana kamu tidak mahu percaya kepada Allah, padahal asalnya kamu benda mati, lalu dihidupi kamu, kemudian ia matikan, kemudian hidupkan kamu, dan kepadaNya kamu kembali"








*patung manusia untuk manusia raksaksa itu menurut kisahnya adalah berkenaan asal kejadian Ya'juj dan Ma'juj.
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Rabu, Disember 09, 2009

The Voyage of Siam - Keris

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Entri adalah update buat entri terdahulu - 03/06/08 Keris menjadi senjata diraja Siam Ayuthaya?


(Perhatikan penggunaan keris dalam filem ini.)

Meskipun tidak faham bahasanya, dalam pemerhatian penulis, tiada satu pun scene dalam filem ini yang melibatkan penggunaan senjata berbentuk keris kecuali dalam scene diatas.

Scene yang telah dipaparkan itu adalah berkenaan Srisudachan yang didapati bunting 3 bulan oleh Tabib China yang tidak mengetahui 'affair' diantara Srisudachan dengan Boonsri Worawongsa sewaktu Chai Raja keluar berperang. Untuk menutup kes, Srisudachan dan pembantu peribadinya (sibadan besar itu) mengambil keputusan membunuh tabib china itu sebelum rahsia mereka terbongkar- versi Thai.


(Foto-Bukankah Laksamana Hang Tuah pernah ke Jepun - Turki dan menunaikan fardu haji di Mekah! - patut letak nama Tuan Haji Hang Tuah...)

Kelibat keris hanya datang sekali sahaja dan khas untuk scene pembunuhan tabib china itu! Walaupun sepatutnya keris itu dipegang secara betul, dan patut ada sarungnya seperti gambar dibawah...

(Foto-Askar Siam berkeris? - perhatikan seluar senteng, lengan pendek)

Kenapa ada keris dalam filem Thai ini? Mudah sahaja kerana raja-raja mereka dahulu memang berkeris kerana Maharaja Siam Islam Dynasti Ayuthia adalah berasal dari Kedah dari keturunan Merong Mahawangsa!

(Foto-Narai yang berkeris)


(Foto- Pheraq (Kekanda yang dikasihi) @ Songtham Ayutthaya - muka Arab/Parsi?)


Bukan kisah affair
Apapun, bukan kisah 'affair' versi Thai itu yang menarik minat penulis. Penulis hanya berminat dengan cara filem ini digarap. Lebih2 lagi 'scene2' peperangan yang memerlukan senjata dan prop yang dibikin dengan penuh ketelitian oleh tenaga2 kerja filem ini. Walaupun filem ini bercorak propaganda tetapi kesungguhan keseluruhan tenaga produksinya patut dijadikan teladan bagi pembikin filem di Malaysia. Cerita2 yang berasaskan sejarah bukan boleh disiapkan dalam satu bulan, malah makan tahun!



(Foto-Formation perang. Seakan-akan bentuk apa ini?? - buat yang mengetahui akan tersenyum)

Penekanan bukan sahaja dari aspek sejarah, malah setiap kostum dan set filem ini perlu mendapat 'endorsement' dan 'approval' dari pihak istana raja thai. Rujukannya pula dari 'vault' khazanah istana raja thai sendiri. Itu yang mahal! Begitu juga dengan scene diatas.

(Foto - The Voyage of Siam. Gambar ini dilukis oleh orang eropah - semestinya mereka 'membesarkan' raja mereka)

Untuk pengetahuan pembaca, selama 5 jam filem ini ditayangkan, penulis tidak faham satu patah perkataan pun, kerana tiada subtitle - 'for Thailand Only Not For Export' katanya. Penulis hanya menghayati scene dan propnya sahaja.













(Foto- Peta Lama Empayar Islam Siam Ayutthaya yang menguasai Nosantara. Kenapa kita semua TIDAK BUDDHA tetapi berpegang kuat dengan AGAMA ISLAM?)


*Segala foto diatas bukan diambil dari wikipedia, tetapi daripada SUMBER THAI - sumbangan dari rakan Majma Budaya dan Warisan Jawi (MAJMA') yang turut sama berjuang untuk menegakkan serta mengembalikan maruah Sejarah Realiti Islam dan Bani Jawi. Terima kasih yang tidak terhingga diucapkan!

Kebetulan pula PM kita DSNR telah pun melawat sedara kita di Selatan Siam, doakan yang terbaik ajelah...







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Selasa, Disember 01, 2009

Interview with: Herman Abdullah [tmp]

6 comments
Interview with:
Herman Abdullah [tmp]

JOURNALISM

What is your specialty? What subjects do you deal with?
First of all, I am a FREEMAN in my own definition. I'm not bound to any political views, therefore bias is not my things - perhaps maybe a little. Depending on the situation and the research that I undertake.

In term of specialty, actually I am more into historical reality. Dealing with research, investigating and reviewing new facts to be brought forward to the society, especially about my nation.

To me, there are too many hidden story about my nation/country that need to be uncovered whereby most of them were shaped by the government own media and propaganda.

That's good to some extent - to the ruling party, but it is not fair to others who is living in the 'information supermarket'. Sooner or later they will find out so better let me the one who tell them about it. So to me it is about educating people about the history.

But it is not easy to break the 'belief system' that was been indoctrinated into the minds of the people, and that lies the challenge that Im willingly to tackle head on.

That's about it.


In which media do you presently work or have you worked?
I'm the owner of THE MALAY PRESS. It is registered as a blog and also a brand name. Thinking of making it available in hard copy - sometime in the future.


Please list a web address where where one can view an example of your work.
1. http://themalaypress.blogspot.com this is for my writing and 2. http://modmantfoto.blogspot.com is for me to release anything that I ve in mind esp. about photojournalism and my other interests.


What is "news"?
News is the story of the NORTH EAST WEST and SOUTH - anything that happens around you. It's only becoming a news if the story is tell to people and it must be 'new' to people and no longer news if people already knew it or nobody mentioning about it.


To you, what is objectivity?
noun
1 a thing aimed at or sought; a goal : the system has achieved its objective.


What is the best headline you have ever read?
HITLER SHOT HIMSELF...was it really a headline?


What headline would you like to see printed one day in the newspaper?
OBAMA CONVERTS TO MOSLEM or perhaps FINALLY ISRAEL MAKE PEACE


Which paper do you buy on Sundays? Where do you read it?
Mingguan Malaysia. In my room where my kid is not allowed to enter.


Does freedom of expression end where the editorial line begins?
I agreed with:

Andi Bob [andibob]


"The freedom of expression, in Journalism, is influenced by the editor-in-chief's IQ and his education"

I do my own press because I dont want some other guys from different background ruin my works.


Do you feel that analytical and investigative journalism is being lost?
Not really because I am doing it. But maybe if the press is owned by political party, should never the journalists are allowed to investigate certain people.


With a camera on every mobile phone, is every citizen becoming a correspondent?
They can be, but they may not be able to go through the front page. Perhaps some photos for fun would be suffice.


How would you explain the boom of the tabloid press?
Tabloid, they just put whatever the want and sometimes they do plagiarism. There is not much responsible on their shoulder. So whatever sells they tell.


What is your position regarding the right to privacy of famous people?
Famous people can be celebs, politicians, religious leader and such. So journalists have to tackle different character at different angle. Some might ruins their job forever. So just be careful and be truth full. Don't paint lies on something which is not right. Respect their privacy if it got nothing to do with the news. But if it a fact can affect the majority then it is under your discretion.


What can you teach us about the art of the interview?
Let it flows.


Please list well-known people you have interviewed.
Mr Radzi Omar - ex national geographic photographer.
Mr Shafie Afdal - Minister of Culture and Heritage.
Mr Mustapha - a tea maker in Petaling Jaya.
Mr Tuan Hj Ishak Itam - the President of PSSCM
Mr Sallehudin - ex street fighter in the 70s.


Would you say the journalism blog is revolutionizing the profession?
Yes, depending on the contents and integrity of the blog.


Will the paper press disappear?
I hope not. Paper press is good for archive and museum need it.


What are your thoughts of the free papers distributed in cities?
I don't really buy newspaper nowadays and free newspaper is actually nothing much different with the selling one.


What is the book you would like to write?
The Malay Historical Reality - A Reflection.


Is there a motto or ethical principle that clarifies your decisions in moments of confusion?
Think critically, evaluate and discretion.


What advice would you give to someone who has just left university and wishes to start in the profession?
Read not just newspaper. Read your surrounding and make sure you know what you write and make sure you educate people with your writings.

© Herman Abdullah
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