Why literary works must be made compulsory for all students?

1.

Forbes ran a good piece by Chad Orzel - the author of Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist - under the title Why Scientists Should Study Art And Literature.

The very same arguments had been given by our literary circle including National Laureates, writers, educational academicians, activists and other to convince the government especially Education Ministry to scrap the existing practice in dividing science students and literature students.

In present practice, brilliant and good students in their exam results have been directed to science stream, while the ordinary one including weak student had to take others such as arts and literature. What our literary circle want is to make literature subjects as a compulsory for all students.

Orzel gave three reasons why students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) fields to take humanities classes including literature, arts, history and philosophy in college and explained the benefits for a future scientist can get from those humanity subjects.

The main reason is empathy - just like what Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi wrote when he criticised his former Prime Minister when his leader shared his favourite book was Guinness Book of World Records - because literary works give a various views of how other peoples perceive the world.

Whether that’s the author, or the director, or the actors, or the characters they’re playing, literature will introduce you to people whose experience of the world has been vastly different than yours.

And that’s critically important because the vast majority of people in the world are not you. In fact, modulo the occasional alternate world scenario, you’re a minority of one.

This is critically important because as much as we might like to, science can’t be walled off from other concerns– science is done by people, and we all bring our own history and experiences to the process of doing science. You’ll need to work with, for, and sometimes around these people, and understanding how they look at the world can be enormously helpful to this process. 

Literature can help with this. Not because any of the books you read will provide a perfect analogue for any of the people you meet, but because it’s good practice. If you read a wide range of literature, and study it carefully, you’ll gain experience in seeing how the world looks to other people.

If the reasons gave by our literary experts and educational academicians was taken for granted by a minister or his deputy or their bureaucrats before, may be a glimpse by a physics professor like Orzel and others can found a way to their minds.

2.

Just got a tweet from Muhammad Fakhruddin, a fellow blogger at Oh!Buku that he presented a paper at Asian Bioethics Conference in Philippine. He shared his insight based on Malay's science fiction novel, Transgenik Sifar (Zero Transgenic*) by Sri Rahayu Mohd Yusop; Leksikon Ledang (Ledang Lexicon*) by Nor Azida Ishak and Fadli Al-Akiti and Klon (Clone*) by Zaifuzaman Ahmad. Hope he can share his paper when come back to Malaysia.

And his paper maybe can give a glimpse of hope to see all students read a good Malaysian literary work.