On Tuesday, the 12th of December, 2006, Bernama.com ran a story concerning Dewan Negara having heated debates on declining moral values among young people. Despite the senators’ disagreements over the actual causes and remedies of the decline in moral values, they seemed to have concurred that there is in fact such a decline. The site also reported the Deputy Minister of Human Resources, Datuk Abdul Rahman Bakar’s call after launching the convocation of the Manpower Department Training Institute (ILJTM) in Kuantan on the same day, for tertiary institutions to drop courses deemed irrelevant to the current needs of the employment market.
Public and private institutions of higher learning, he said among others, should be focusing more on skills training rather than theory, somehow emulating vocational institutes whose graduates do not have any problems getting hired.
In fact, about four months earlier-that is, on Monday, the 21st of August, 2006-as reported by Bernama.com, Human Resources Minister Datuk Seri Dr Fong Chan Onn himself made a similar remark during the 11th Public Service Conference at INTAN Bukit Kiara.
Such calls for relevance are not new; in fact, as far as Post-Independence Malaysia is concerned, they have been recurrent.
As these two concerns-namely, the concern regarding the declining moral values among young people on the one hand, and the concern surrounding the urgency to remain relevant to the ever-changing job market on the other hand-were raised by figures closely related to the ruling government, how then can we make sense of these two concerns?
Are those problems not ours and, as such, we should not bother ourselves with them? Or, are they what we are also worried about?
It is quite obvious that at present, the religious and ethical content of the curricula at such institutions is still minimal and very much segregated. Given this, in addition to the ineffective manner in which they are taught, it is quite difficult to see how such curricula can help address the first concern mentioned above in relation to the second. What’s more, people generally get the impression that in the actual work place, especially in the business and financial sectors where competitiveness and rivalry is high, the “survival of the fittest” seems to be the unwritten rule while ethics and morality are irrelevant.
Perhaps, we should not feel utterly hopeless about our present predicament. There may still be harmony between these two apparently opposing concerns in those domains of human life where survival is what matters.
On the 7th of December, 2006, Deputy Finance Minister Datuk Dr Ng Yen Yen in her keynote address at the National Award for Management Accounting (NAfMA) 2006 highlighted that companies which practise good corporate governance are more likely to produce higher returns as well as attract more long-term and loyal investors, thus clearly indicating that corporate governance does not compromise on the pursuit for profitability contrary to previously held convictions.
Therefore, a way out of the predicament may well be to teach the young people moral lessons which are relevant to the job market. This sounds good only as long as profitability can be realized in tandem with what is ethically good.
But what about situations where profitability is acquired at the cost of comprising one’s ethical principles?
Man is generally prone not only to misconstrue between wants and needs but also to create many forms of artificial demands, particularly through the influence and manipulation of advertisement through all sorts of media.
This means that a market left alone is not always the perfect mechanism to reflect what is good for the individuals as well as society. As such, to tailor the moral lessons-or any subject on ethics for that matter-to what the market determines makes us run the risk of embracing religion and ethics simply out of pragmatic and utilitarian considerations.
Or, are we in fact approaching a state where Voltaire was reported to have been once? Owen Chadwick, in his The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, when touching upon Voltaire’s refusal to let men talk about atheism in the presence of the maids, related the latter’s remark, “I want my lawyer, tailor, valets, even my wife, to believe in God; I think that if they do I shall be robbed less and cheated less.” Morality and ethics in the religious sense is about perennial matters that abide. Conversely, the market is characterized by change. But change is always towards a purpose, and it is this purpose which gives sense and meaning to change. Three decades ago, Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas reminded us that ultimately, this purpose cannot itself undergo change because if it does, then it is not really one’s purpose but rather is a means.
Yet, in modern civilization, as one Vyacheslav Stiopin observes when deliberating upon “Modern Technologies and Perspectives of Civilization,” “transformation and progress become a value in themselves…not unlike a bicycle whose stability is guaranteed by its movement, but the moment it stops, it falls to the ground.”
But if we continue, wittingly or unwittingly, to associate purpose and direction in our life to what is changing, especially at all educational levels, then we are acting like one who, to borrow Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s metaphor, is “…trained to study only the movement of clouds and to remain completely oblivious of the sky, with its immutable and infinite expanses, which provides the framework for the observations of the cloud movements.”
Therefore, another area for us to venture into earnestly and seriously is the attempt to create working conditions and job markets which are relevant to moral enhancement, instead of the other way around. This can somehow be incorporated in the hadhari approach the government is now promoting with the hope that eventually we can address ourselves correctly and effectively to the problems of the declining moral values among our youth in addition to staying relevant despite the vicissitudes of the job markets.