ISSUE #1 • VOLUME 44:1
ASIAN BEACON YOUTH WALL
theconnect
I Don’t Want To Eat Other Dogs! KEDRIC KWAN, 18, gives his twosen’s worth on Higher Education
“Aiyo I want you to be successful and make lots of money mah!” thus sayeth my parents whenever we ask why we must go to uni. “If you wanna make a lot of money and don’t wanna sleep by the roadside, make sure you go to university, ok?!” they always chant. I don’t blame my parents. My mum’s mum probably told her and her mum’s mum most likely said the same. But since when is success all about making money and nothing else? I know, I know. Education is a must. Education is non-negotiable. Start work too early also no point. Yes, yes, I understand. But there’s no harm (and may even reflect good education?) to occasionally question all these “dogmas”, right? For starters, what about the debt that higher education burdens us with? Nowadays, a college degree can range anywhere from RM30,000 to RM100,000 and all the way up to RM1 mil! Picture yourself as a pony dragging a huge wagon of debts for years. Ok, so maybe our parents pay but the point is that there’s a huge sum involved, and haven’t we troubled them enough already? Also, higher education tends to plug us into the big superficial glitzy mirage called the “Malaysian
dream”. This dream goes something like this: Arrive on earth as a baby, endure torture from kindergarten til high school and university, go out to work, have kids and give them education, then die. Sounds boring? Heck yah. It’s the dog-eat-dog life, which is sad because real dogs don’t even eat other dogs, duh! If we are studying just to make money, then our career will never be focused on anything more than getting big bucks. Forget about impacting the world around us. All we do is work work work, thinking that would make us “rich” but the truth is that that kind of life isn’t “rich” at all. Far from it. Breathing every day and having blood pumped through our veins are not living; that’s staying alive. To me, living is going out there and making a difference to the world around me, living my dreams and helping others achieve theirs. It’s
about being salt and light. Ok la, enough of punching formal education in its face! Of course there’s a place for formal education in life and that happens when we are studying something we’re passionate about. That way, we will actually apply what we are studying and not waste our parents’ hard-earned dough. Let’s think about it this way: Studying is like eating. When we study for the sake of studying, seeing university as simply the path to cold hard cash, it’s like eating food and then puking it all out. Hey, isn’t that what we do during our exams? Memorise, then regurgitate. And anyway, the information we puke out is the same as everyone else’s. Puke is puke no matter where it comes out from. However, when we study something we are passionate about, we eat the food, savour, digest and use it, and then it becomes a part
of us. In short, if we study stuff we don’t enjoy, it’s going to feel like poop. If we love what we’re studying, the food builds us. People always tell me, “I wanna be successful, that’s why must go college.” It’s not wrong thinking about being successful, but what does success really mean? For me, it’s simply doing what makes me happy, which is making a positive impact on the people around me. Does that require any formal education? It depends. I’m not saying you should follow me; what you should do is define your own meaning of success and before embarking on your journey of formal education, dig deep and find your passion, then do it. Like what Chow Yuen Fatt – sorry, I meant Confucius! – once said, “Choose a job (in this case, a course) you love and you never have to work (in this case, study!) a day in your life.”