NOVEMBER 19 — Creating unity and harmony between rich pluralistic societies is the prime endeavour of Malaysian educational philosophy.

When we say unity, it doesn’t merely concern a single entity, but encompassed more than one, such as unity in multiracial, unity in religion, unity in the way of expressing our patriotism, unity in order to build our nation under the tenet of justice and equality, and much more.

Every one of this element possessed distinguish advantage towards the well-being of our society.

Malaysia is the nation which embraced an amazingly multitude of different culture, race and religion. Though this harmonious reality was ever crashed in a violent way in 1969 but surprisingly succeeded to rebuild the notion of pluralism and persisting ceaselessly.

Productive ideas, innovation and victory made by our people from various racial background proved the transcendent unity possessed by our Nation in a global prospect.

There are numerous studies concluded that interracial interaction empower creativity and enhance the whole development of the collective society.

Furthermore psychologist has discovered that the human race began to civilize far more rapidly with the presence of interaction between human from various groups.

There are several leading factors towards an effort to perishable the great moments of unity among different races and undeniably the role of education was most crucial and fill with astonishing capability in bringing forth the idea of unity in reality.

The most powerful social context where an individual learns to comprehend the existence of another kind with difference in colour, race, religion, cultural and ideology are school. School supposed to be the prime arena for our younger generation to generate an absolute perception regarding the essence of sustaining unity in multiracial society. From this standpoint, we may conclude that, school always inherited the profound capability to influence the concept of unity in the younger generation.

According to the Philip Zimbardo’s most influential Stanford prison experiment, the power of a given situation can easily override individual difference in personality. This concept ultimately sheds light on the nature of human tendency towards the influence of social context.

For an instance, if an individual, though inherited upright personality, may easily turn his back if he/she was stimulated continuously by an ineffective situation. They might turn absolutely in an opposite way, then we have predicted. This is what exactly termed by Zimbardo as "The Lucifer Effect”. This concept revealed how an ordinary, average, even good human to become perpetrators of evil.

Although we understand the importance of minimizing racial disparities among students with various racial backgrounds are crucial for maintaining the unity preserved by our nation and knows exactly the role play by school, but we still can see the profound decrease of interracial friendship/interaction in the context of school.

Most of us ever encountered the self-evident experience of noticing students tendency to form a clique mostly from their same racial background and incline to mingle up with others. This scenario was surprisingly visible when they are turned into the secondary school. This phenomenon was described and supported by numerous studies and articulate precisely that interracial friendship decreases across age and grades.

What factors that affect the probability of students forming friendship only with their own race?

If you want the answer in one phrase, I would like to say it is the boomerang effect of inequality. Inequality in every aspect of their life provides insight on how to label the others as "out-group”.

The earlier exposure, which reflects the notion of inequality in school context, such as racial discrimination and bias makes them gripped harder their self-automated racial segregation attitudes.

Students tend to form a group of people who’s shared collective similar experience and shared ideology of life and almost from similar socioeconomic status. This experience dominates the concept of unity which was mentioned in our educational philosophy. The mindset of classism (like racism and sexism), believing that those individual from that group are "superior” to ours, creating gaps and reduce the possibility to mingle up.

This early emanation of the racial disparity proved to have larger consequences in their later career life and curtail the art of unity. Combating this terrifying ill-intense stereotype should have begun earlier by a positive racial socialization from their parents and also undeniably the role of teacher in rendering support and not devaluing students based on social and academic hierarchy.

The fact is that the presence of interracial friendship/interaction at the center of school context will have greater potentiality in reaching the core essence of our philosophy of education. Being ignorant towards the existence of others and finding grace and focused only on their respective well being of the tribe not only diminish the art of creativity but also leads to the instantaneous calamity of the humanity.

*This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.