The university for national values

Title

Creator

Silcock, T. H.

Language

English

Source

Panorama Volume XXI (No. 4) April 1969

Year

1969

Rights

In Copyright - Educational Use Permitted

Abstract

This is a deeply considered view of a famous British professor and economist who made a long study of universities in Southeast Asia

Fulltext

■ This is a deeply considered view of a famous British professor and economist who made a long study of universities in Southeast Asia. THE UNIVERSITY FOR NATIONAL VALUES A fundamental feature of university life in Southeast Asia is that it has been im ported from abroad, with ready-made value systems sometimes already crystallized in institutions, techniques, and attitudes. But academic values outside Southeast Asia are neither uniform nor un changing, and the compari son of different colonial aca demic models is stimulating new thought in the region. The institutions in which these values are exemplified are no longer sacrosanct. .. The imitation of foreign curricula, reading lists, and examination questions makes for unnecessary cultural con flict. One set of cultural and political ideas is approved academically; a quite diffe rent set finds expression in newspapers and in public life. And because the public is made to think of the uni versity as mainly a source of factual knowledge, students come to rely on memoiy and care little for principles and techniques. It would seem to be wiser for the univer sities to make it quite clear that it is an important part of university training to change attitudes and to pro duce real professional peo ple — doctors who can really cure, lawyers who can up hold the law, historians who can find out and interpret what happened. The claim should be made. It may make the governments keener than ever to have universities staffed by their own nations, who share the national aspirations; it may mean wrestling with difficult constitutional issues; but the right of the university, how ever constituted, to control the training of attitudes is one that should be fought for and won. For the whole concept of professional codes, 14 Panorama and of the training of pro fessional responsibility, is still unfamiliar in many of these countries. Universities are seen as places where people can learn to pass examinations and so gain the knowledge formerly mono polized by Europeans. They are seen by too few as places where values are created and attitudes changed. — From the Southeast Asian Univer sity by T. H. Silcock, Emeri tus Professor of Economics, Malaya U. JAPAN TODAY Japan could easily become a nuclear power after 1967. Several reactors will soon be in opera tion. They produce plutonium as a by-product. That plutonium could be used to manufacture a stockpile of Nagasaki-type plutonium bombs. In addition, Japan’s own four-stage rocket, which places a three-hundred-pound satellite in orbit 650 miles above the earth, puts the country close to the scale of our Minuteman missile. This rocket is the primary American thermonuclear deterrent. All of Japan’s Prime Ministers have been interested in A-weapons. The present Premier Eisaku Sato told the Parliament that China was a real threat to Japan now that she had a nuclear armory. Sato’s remarks were made openly, but they didn’t affect commercial and unofficial diplomatic contacts with China. That made the revelations of the Premier more interesting. — From the Experts by Seymour Freidin & George Bailey. April 1969 15

pages

14+

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