We are all aware about how bad Malaysians are in one way or the other. The Chinese with their stupid arrogance, the Malays with their inferiority complexness and the Indians with their opportunistic indecisiveness and so on. Despite the ugliness, I refuse to believe that we are a hopeless nation.
When the Americans or the Jews discovered a child’s potential, their government would give the child special attention and keeps a close eye on him/her. The child’s progress would be monitored and studied, even experimented.
Whatever the potential the child may have would be considered an asset to the country. As the time comes or as the child is ready, he/she would be ‘persuaded’ to serve the country.
He/she could be offered to work with scientists who are working on new high-tech drugs for medical purposes or could be taken in by the defense unit to work with the engineers to build high-tech weapons. He/she could also be taken in by CIA to be trained for code-breaking. Or they might be absorbed into a group with other geniuses to invent codes or to explore whatever it is that can be explored from the universe.
Wherever he/she is, he/she would be trained and developed so that one day he/she could help takes the country to the next level.
Meanwhile…, what do we do with our child’s potential here, in Malaysia?
We may have a girl with special talent in music, with perfect tune ear, but we don’t even send her to music school and nobody knows about her ability. We may have an autistic boy who ‘reads’ mathematics but the parents and teachers considered the boy as dumb because he cannot read as well as other boys his age and couldn’t pass other subjects, but math.
We could have had quite a few Einsteins or Edisons all these years, but since they were dragged over to religious schools and have no exposure to real science in action, and therefore don’t even know whether they are interested in science.
Of course, we have this little boy, Adiputra (did I get the name right?) who can teach engineering level of mathematics so they say, but what did we do to him? Last I heard, he was on PAS ceramah’s stage and I bet people are lining up for his ‘air jampi’.
We once had this girl with 12 or 15 straight As in SPM and what did we do with her? We put her and her mom on commercial ads and then we fight over her revealing of her hair.
It’s not that we don’t appreciate or acknowledge the brains, we do. That’s why the government is calling all Malaysian brains overseas to come home and serve the country.
The question is, serve as what? Or how? How could these brains contribute the country apart from cutting taxes from their salaries?
You know, the brains don’t necessarily be in overseas. They could be down there in some village in Baling Kedah or some primary schools in rural areas in Sarawak. They could be in UiTM, or any of our local college for all we know.
What we need to do, is first differentiate between the smart ones and the geniuses and identify their areas of abilities. Of course, we have to have the necessary method to do this before we would be able to make full use of their potential.
Just because a person holds a PHD doesn’t mean that he could be a good CEO in a GLC, or a good adviser to the PM or a good Youth Wing Chief in a political party. To be a leader, one must have wisdom, and to have wisdom, one must have lots of experience.
Like everybody else, geniuses too, need experience to achieve their full potential. No matter how high their IQs are, they are just humans who need guidance and support on how to handle their knowledge, abilities or talents.
A genius has to be in his field and develop things within his expertise and strive to soar in his own area in order for the country to be able to fully utilize his ability.
Therefore, before the government called the brains in overseas back and offer them all sorts of ridiculous privileges, we must first make sure that they are as brainy as we think they are and that they could be an asset, not a burden. We want them to come back and make things better not screw things up.
If they can’t really contribute, the least they can do is help the government develop a method to reach and identify potentials in our children and figure out how to develop and make use of those potentials.
You know what? Malaysia could have developed our own defense code system or a new spy technology to curb crime. We don’t have to hire foreign consultants or purchase high-tech gadgets from others. Since we are in so much hurry to become a First World Nation, it should be about time that we have a team of brains to come out with an invention, anything at all that can be used or can be sold.
Is this too high an imagination?
A brilliant brain alone is not enough, we need to imagine as high and try to reach as far and beyond the ordinary in order to achieve excellence. But remember, brilliance without wisdom could lead you back to stupidity.
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