The arising social media has slowly eradicated the fundamental definition of reading and the fabrication of inappropriate information on the internet has influenced our people thought. People are not fond with reading carefully and discussing their differences politely anymore, their judgements and behaviours are blindly based on enlarged titles that they have come across on Facebook or Instagram.

The government provided me 12 years of free education in Malaysia, what I had to pay was only miscellaneous fee. And naively I thought it was normal until I started to meet some people from different countries. My foreign friends would often compare school fees between government school and private school, the first time when I heard their conversation, I exclaimed and asked:

“Why do you need to pay for your government school?”

“Don’t you pay for your school fee?” They asked too.

They always remind me how blissful I am as a Malaysian. I enjoyed the benefit of free education for 12 years and I was able to enter tertiary education with my high school qualifications without adding any burden to my parents.

I often wonder what is the purpose of giving us free education? What do the the government expect from us? 12 years of education has given us the ability to read, to understand words, to be able to write, and I believe that many Malaysians were treated the same too. Undoubtedly the system has improved the literate rate drastically in Malaysia since independence.

Words are important tools to transmit our message. The next challenge we have now is to utilise this ability with conscience and compassion, not only the government, the citizens as well need to be responsible not to disseminate harmful contents too.

We do not want someone playing the racial cards, we do not want someone swearing or throwing tantrums whenever they disagree with someone’s opinion; we hope that we could seek concord despite differences, we hope we could discuss issues in a ‘Budiman’ way. From grassroots to elites, everyone of us should start practising ‘Budi Bicara’, expressing our opinions without causing any truce and any abusive remark.

If I do have some grammar mistakes that could hinter your comprehension, I would like to make it shorter. In Malaysia’s form 5 moral studies text book, we have a moral value list. Whenever I feel like cursing people who I disagree with, I would look at no.13, ‘Hemah Tinggi’, loosely translated in english as high prudence. This is one of the bits that the education system has given to me.