COMMENT | Love, respect, happiness. These are not pillars of learning but adornments of Malaysian education.

What are the pillars? Sustainability, human rights, deep-learning. These are the pillars that we need before anything else. How? Why?

Talking about making schools happy and respectful is not enough if the pillars of schooling still rest on apartheid-styled, race-based policies in education, and the infiltration of radical Islam.

Today, Malaysian leaders from political to the educational seems to have this love affair with preacher Zakir Naik, for god knows what reason.

There is now more talk about advanced Islamisation, of the Education Ministry's intention of bringing in the Muhammadiyah University to Johor to provide a greater ground of ideology of Islamism to grow. The Islamisation agenda of the 80s is continuing in its third phase, with new players, new leaders, new nodes and neural networks.

We don’t need more Islamic universities such as the Muhammadiyah. We need to infuse philosophy, critical thinking and moral reasoning into our public universities...