malaysiakini logo
story-image
mk-logo
From Our Readers
Khairy’s rhetoric on abolishing vernacular schools
ADS

I have just watched the movie 'Hidden Figures', and it is an inspiring one.

Khairy's rhetoric about the political will to abolish vernacular schools, to me, is a metaphor for the flip side of 'Hidden Figures'. This politician has put to shame his supposedly good academic background by hiding figures from that audience that should enable the thinking and rational rakyat to make more informed decisions.

All our institutions of state are using hidden figures to hoodwink the rural folks and the unthinking rakyat that all is rosy with the 1MDB issue. Just look south, Singapore has already sentenced a few individuals to jail for their roles in the money laundering of 1MDB funds.

Yet, here we are told not a sen of 1MDB funds have disappeared. The Department of Justice (DOJ) of the United States has taken action to recover funds siphoned from 1MDB to acquire properties in the US, primarily. Unless one chooses not to see, it is blatantly obvious our authorities are using hidden figures to escape a proper accounting of their misdeeds.

In the movie, Katherine Johnson's courage and belief in herself is outstanding. She did not shout or lead marches but by her quiet dignity and competency, gained her the respect of her boss in an all whites Langley’s Flight Research Division, where she plotted trajectories for John Glenn’s orbit around Earth and Apollo 11’s 1969 flight to the moon.

No, please do not get me wrong - I admire our Ambiga Sreenavasan and Maria Chin Abdullah and what they are doing for our country - my point is that, in the whites supremacy of her time, Katherine was able to stand her ground because her talent and ability was respected. This is why the brain drain from our country will continue. The authorities, in their 'Ketuanan ideology', has ignored the talents and abilities of those rakyat who found such recognition overseas.

Dorothy Vaughan's ability to read the fast changing world of human computers (research mathematicians who calculated equations by hand for engineers) when electronic machines from IBM entered the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (Nasa) service. She took it upon herself to learn the computing language to do the necessary programming then and went on to help train her black colleagues at Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory.

So, no Big Brother's helping hand but initiative and hard work led her to be promoted as the first black supervisor at Langley in 1951. She moved on to work in electronic computing and programming. There is the truth of the saying 'where's there's a will, there's a way'.

Dorothy did not step back and allow herself to become a victim of the progress of technology at Nasa then. She not only took the bull by the horn but helped her fellow black colleagues keep pace with technology and got to keep their jobs.

In our country now, there's news of many unemployable graduates from our local public universities, Yes, there's that mismatch of our local public varsities training programs with what local industry needs. Yet many of those graduates are also at fault - they had been spoon fed throughout our education system, until they have lost sight of the fact that in the real world, not everything is handed to them on a silver platter. They have to be flexible, they have to learn on the job.

Finally, hidden figures give me hope that change might still materialise, come GE14.

View Comments