As we celebrate the 191st anniversary of the Penang Free School today, here is an interesting reminiscence by A. Murad Merican that appeared in the New Straits Times on 25 Aug 2007. Murad is an associate professor at the Universiti Teknologi Mara in Shah Alam where he teaches mass communication and the social sciences.
What attracted me to this article was his recollection of his school days at our alma mater, the Penang Free School. He was four years my junior in school and our paths never crossed. But through his article, it seems that we have a lot in common, a sense of belonging together. Heck, what’s colonialism, post-colonialism or anti-colonialism? There’s no place for them in our lives. Just…living history. And whether we want to nor not, we remain a part of it.
Here is Murad’s article:
THE EDUCATION OF AN OLD FREE: Let the spirit of nationhood burn bright
MY first exposure to the subject of history was in Standard Four in Francis Light School (FLS) on Perak Road, Penang.
It was the padang, a huge stretch of space to the imagination of a 10-year-old boy then, overlooked by that blue and beige partly wooden structure of the FLS that was the place to learn and play.
Freedom was as much as the space one is capable of consuming.
The school was in the Dato Keramat Road area — known as the oldest address in Penang — as gathered from colonial records produced by the successors of Francis Light of the British East India Company.
What about the non-Malays?
What about their knowledge of Muhammad or the knowledge about Buddha, Jesus and Confucius by Muslims?
Local and what we call “world history” and history as such, is an essential, in fact, critical learning tool at the early years of schooling. Taught in the proper context, people, events and ideas that precede our existence can penetrate into our consciousness and be able to mitigate our prejudices in years to come.
A significant phase in my formative years was at Penang Free School (PFS) which was set up in 1816 — yes, the first English school east of Suez, and the epitome of excellence, order and discipline.
Can we bring back the cane please? That ethos may not be the same as during the time I studied there between 1970 and 1976. Being exposed to history from Form One is essentially a fusion of the past and the present.
My Lower Six geography teacher was Lim Boon Hor and the headmaster in 1976 was Goon Fatt Chee.
It was from Goon that I earnestly picked up English literature. No, he was not my literature teacher. He never taught me in class. But he taught me during the school assembly every Monday morning, where his lectures were lessons on life peppered with the lines of Keats and Wordsworth.
But it was Cheng Hin who taught us English literature — and we were exposed to George Bernard Shaw, Shakespeare and Chinua Achebe. He was also my English teacher in 1974 who once gave back an essay I wrote, saying that it was too good to be given a grade. Instead of a grade, he wrote “Where did you get this?”. Sir, I swear I did not copy. I wish he were reading this piece.
Then there was Lim Chin Kee (I heard he passed away years ago), who taught us geography and general paper. His encyclopaedic orientation fascinated me. A feature noted in the introduction of his classes was “the scheme of things”. Whatever that meant to us then, it surely made an impact on me years after.
In fact, Lim Chin Kee taught us to think in terms of big ideas. But it was Lim Yeang Phai, who taught us to “think big”.
He taught us to think in terms of scale and ratio, which later in life, enabled me to think and comprehend in McLuhanist terms — after the media guru Marshall McLuhan.
But geography would not be complete without history (but where are both in the current primary school system?).
For behind every history, there is a geography.
The ’74 cohort, when I was in Form Five, was a product of that past. The built environment in the school compound, the building itself, evoked an ethos of everything colonial — from the corridors, teachers (their manners and ways of speaking), the paintings of early Penang hung along the corridors, the school bell; to the padang, and the image of the songkok worn by Captain Mohd Noor Mohamed, the feared chairman of the School’s Board of Governors.
In February this year, the class of ’74 organised a reunion. Most were born in 1957, and would be 50 this year (except for those from the express class).
In 1974, I was in Form Five. Penang Free School has done well in instilling in us the spirit of Fortis Atque Fidelis (the brave and the true). How true that came out to be. And remember D’Flop, the Form Four magazine?
I could not attend the gathering. But I keep in touch with some of us. Prior to the reunion, we were communicating through e-mail. One of our schoolmates, Siow Jin Keat, learnt the meaning of tumpah darah ku; and Ramlan Ibrahim learnt the Shakespearean reality of life.
But where are we as a nation with a collective memory and experience?
Most of the responses came from my non-Malay schoolmates. And I noticed some sense of guilt arising from years of self-exile — either geographically, historically or culturally.
Many of us have migrated to Singapore, Australia, the United States, Britain, Indonesia and Thailand.
Some would have been historically isolated; others, culturally insulated.
It surely is never a sin to reclaim one’s history and identity. I can see words like tumpah darah ku, and on a lighter side, the nasi kandar at the school canteen we left more than three decades ago.
How do we — the 50-year-olds this year — embody the life of the nation, uphold nationhood and nation building?
What is the past — was it colonial, Latinised, traditional — or the present — modernised, post-modernised? How do we see ourselves? What is our collective memory like? Disparate, diffused, eclectic? How have we managed our consciousness of history?
Karl Marx, the Indus Civilisation, the Fall of the Roman Empire and the poems of Keats and Wordsworth may be far removed and have nothing to do with us.
Fortunately or not, our identities are fusions between the past and the present.
Many in the class of ’74 went through the process in a state of tension — both harmonious and contradictory.
Still, the game was a fair one. Penang Free School was (and to some, still is) a colonial institution.
We live in eclectic times. We have different versions of cultural, social and political lives. Over the last few decades, we had consumed a litany of histories. The least we can do is to understand that there are many histories.
Associate Professor Dr A. Murad Merican (a native of Penang who describes himself as a consumer of history — colonial, postcolonial and anticolonial) teaches mass communication and the social sciences at Universiti Teknologi Mara, Shah Alam. He can be contacted at amurad@salam.uitm.edu.my