📕 Book Review: Breaking But Not Broken

Breaking, But Not Broken by Ghazally Ismail, Ahmad Ibrahim and Hisham Badrul Hashim was launched on 8 August, but had not yet reached the bookshops when it came into my hands. It is a beautifully produced and illustrated book. Its foreword is written by Sultan Nazrin Shah of Perak, who commends the authors for their courage in writing it and who articulates the purpose of education not merely as the production of human capital, but as the formation of a generation balanced in skills, sensitivities and values.

The book concerns the Malay College Kuala Kangsar (MCKK), one of Malaysia's most distinguished schools. It is a careful, affectionate and at times unflinching examination of a school that clearly had a profound impact on its authors — while at the same time reaching beyond that school to ask larger questions about Malaysian education as a whole, and about the need for a fundamental change in direction.

The three authors were educated at MCKK during a period that deserves to be understood in its proper historical context. In the years following independence, Malaysia was engaged in a bold, ambitious project: the deliberate construction of a multi-ethnic national identity from a diversity of cultures, languages and religions that might otherwise have made cohesion impossible. MCKK was itself a living version of that project — an academically selective school where a shared sense of duty to help build the new nation was as much a part of the education as anything in the curriculum. The son of a fisherman sat next to a prince as an equal. What the authors describe is not nostalgia for privilege, but something closer to the memory of a real experiment in human possibility.

That experiment, they argue, has begun to go awry — though the book is careful to hold open the possibility of renewal. Their diagnosis is careful and their tone remarkably free of political recrimination. They are calling on something prior to politics: on the human values that made the original project worth attempting. In this they echo, perhaps without intending to, the spirit of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto: Remember your humanity, and forget the rest.

This is not a book about educational theory. It is a book written from the heart by distinguished men who care about their country and their school.

What the book reaches toward, but does not quite supply, is a clear articulation of the principles that would make its vision transferable — not only across Malaysia's own diverse educational landscape, but beyond it. The need the authors identify in Malaysia is one I recognise from my own experience in Japan and in the UK. What strikes me about Malaysia, however, is that I sense there a genuine openness to the kind of fundamental rethinking that other systems have so far resisted. The principles at stake are not Malaysian principles. They are human ones. As our world becomes increasingly one, the direction in which any national education system must move is toward our common humanity — and that direction is the same everywhere.

I am planning a fuller response to the book. This piece stands as an introduction to that conversation.