Academic Reading in Malaysia: A Problematization

By Muhammad Edham
To read, according to the American philosopher, Mortimer Adler, is to engage in a non-verbal
educational conversation with an invisible teacher. I would add that the teachers could be anyone
from whatever section in our society, not just scholars and researchers, given the various writing
media that one can engage in other than books. The parallel between reading and an intellectual
dialogue then makes establishing reading culture critical to our intellectualizing effort. A
Malaysian scholar, Ambigapathy Pandian has done the Malaysians a favor in problematizing
their reading culture, noting the downward trend of interest in reading, as well as the lack of
“enabling environment for the development of reading practices” in the country. Ambigapathy
called out the fact that Malaysian students read primarily as part of academic activities in
contradistinction to the intellectual interest. Various research on Malaysian higher education
students from time to time seemed to reflect upon Ambigapathy’s observation. Take note on
Shameem Ahmed’s study of reading attitude, enjoyment, and anxiety among UMSKAL
undergraduates in 2016; approximately 52% of its respondents’ reading materials consist of
academic reading, both online and physical. Jamiah Baba and Faiz Rostam’s 2020 report on
UiTM Puncak Alam students is even more telling; 58% of its their respondents read
academically once a week with the materials consisting of 48.8% textbooks and 37.5% online
journal articles, with more than 70% of them believed in its reinforcement of their academic
performance, career path and employability. Perhaps Ambigapathy’s most important
contribution is the introduction of the concept, reader’s reluctance, a quality indicated through,
in one part, the possession of necessary literacy skills and abundance of reading materials, and
in the other, the lack of reflective reading interest and activity.
It is important to stress that Ambigapathy’s reading reluctance concept reflect the
problem of intellectual reading as opposed to academic reading, an essence that many Malaysian
reading researchers had critically missed by not recognizing the reading distinction in category.
In my opinion, based on the review done of the accumulated Malaysian reading literature, an
overarching reason that underplays other different factors can be pointed to our reading culture
which has always been categorically academic. This originates from the previously alluded
notion of academic versus intellectual learning, a theme that I have addressed before. Academic
learning, the concrete instance of which I would argue can be found in university learning has
the following characteristic which have been described in “The ‘Mahasiswa’: An Intellectual
Vision Reviewed” where,
students are obligated to learn various subjects in class and must complete many forms
of assessments ranging from written assignment to examination which require revisions.
In a subject alone, they are expected to gain a set of different outcomes, as outlined by
the Malaysian Qualification Framework
Further, I elaborated in “University, the Finger of the Visible Hand”,
This obviously means that student learning is structured, and such structuring is
sanctioned; compliance with the regulation will result in certification, and failure will
 not. Here, one can already surmise that certification is the concrete indicator of learning
and thus, would not be surprised to see, through this regulation, that it also becomes the
actual indicator of learning.
In these two essays, I made a critical point on how academic learning is a toil that feeds on
student’s labor, subservient to the larger rational order of capitalism underpinning the university
institutions. I have also argued of the danger in reformative effort that ignores this social reality,
reminding fellow reader that student’s wellbeing would be at peril due the toil mentioned. I
conceptualize integrally, this toil, the definition of academic learning cited above, taking into
account student’s psychological point of view, as academic ascetism.
Ascetism as I mean here, is Nietzchean i.e., it refers to the preoccupation with an
idealized existence against and within actual condition. Friedrich Nietzsche had for so long
argued on the necessary link between ascetism and nihilism, asserting that the upholding of lofty,
sacred, universal ideals will almost always result in the loss of meaning against one’s present
condition due to its unattainability. On this, he said, “this life, then, is placed by them in relation
to an existence of quite another character, which it excludes and to which it is opposed, unless it
deny itself”. Academic ascetism then is the preoccupation of the academic ideal against and
within actual academic condition. The lofty ideal of the academic is the best grade and
therefore, certification that promises the best career qualification. Student’s preoccupation
to achieve and realize this ideal constitute the ascetic path, action, and discipline. Nietzsche’s
integral ascetic thesis that the ideal is always existentially opposed to the real is embodied
through the notion that student’s act of learning is inherently irrelevant to the said academic
ideal. In fact, all the process of learning is conditional to the contribution it makes on student’s
grade, through assessments and examinations.
Learning as such is approached and valued from an exterior perspective, indifferent to its
interior, intrinsic value, rendering the entire experience mundanely laborious. In spite of the
laborious process of studying, academic achievement is skewed against the background of the
academic ideal; only few of the entire group are able to obtain the near-perfect grades, while the
majority performed at mediocre level. This give rise to a secondary set of ideals which is
graduation with passing, average grades, representing the sobriety within the students who has
now perceived academic excellence as difficult and therefore not achievable by everyone except
for the most prodigious and industrious. The significance of this secondary ideal lies in the fact
that it bears resemblance to the Nietzchean nihilism, the belief that “something is to be achieved
through the world process itself; and now we grasp that the process achieves nothing,
accomplishes nothing”. Academic learning, then, is a grueling, exertive, and inauspicious
process.
Naturally, academic reading partakes academic learning, and as such, it would also
constitute the feature of academic ascetism. Reading activity and materials are conditional to the
contribution it makes on student’s grade, through assessments and examinations. Books and
reading materials are not in themselves relevant to the student’s interest, only to be read within
stipulated time so as to fit their academic schedule for specific academic purpose. As such, it is
less likely for book love in the sense meant by cultural sociologist María Angélica Thumala
Olave to develop because the iconic power of books, i.e., the inextricable link of the reading
materials to the promise of intangible, esoteric goods (i.e., knowledge, self-growth), that give
rise to the said love can only be perceived through intellectual interest in reading. Instead,
student’s relation to book is academically ascetic, “they read for academic reason, and as soon
as they finish schooling, reading would cease” as Ambigapathy remarked. In Shameem Ahmed’s
study, reading is reported by her respondents to elicit fatigue (41%), despite great exertion,
difficult to understand (43.2%), requiring a lot of assistance (56.5%), avoided as it creates
anxious feelings (52.8%), not enjoyable (41.1%), upsetting (40.4%), and not considered a
favorite activity (46.9%). This explains students’ major preference of non-reading activities over
reading as observed critically in various local studies.
Academic reading, partaking academic ascetism, is a stratifying practice, a manifestation
of institution reproducing societal inequality. It is in the interest of capitalist system that there
avail a pool of laborers possessing necessary skills for smooth operation and expansion of its
venture. Jacob L. Mey remarked on this logic within capitalist early stage of societal
development, “workers were now not only hired for their purely technical skills, but for their
'understanding' of - and care in - manipulating the new machines, for their 'machine literacy'.”
In its original connotation meant by Jacob Mey here, ‘machine literacy’ pertains to knowledge
of machinery operation, but I would like to transpose the concept into new contextual network of
meaning by contrasting it with ‘human literacy’. In this context, which is our current context,
‘machine literacy’ is instrumental, segmented, regulatory, literal, and efficiency oriented.
According to Malaysian sociologist, Shaharuddin Maaruf, Malay capitalist philosophy has
skewed to favor the capitalist gain over the capitalist process which led to ruthless vision of
wealth accumulation bordering corruption and injustice. We can infer that capitalism can
possibly be a positive force when he said,
if in the beginning it serves the purpose of encouraging the entrepreneurship spirit and
business ability among the Malays, when it reached the middle part of the road, it
emphasized more the ambition of acquiring wealth by any means without consideration
of the entrepreneur values and attitude. (Boldened by me)
I would argue instead that such capitalist ethic meant by Shaharuddin is not totally lost on
Malaysians except that it has been transposed into power mechanism of the elite over the non-
elite, i.e., the workers. In this transposed version, the spirit is industrious, and the ability is
working skill. The values and attitude are all that pertains to worker’s ethics. A good worker is
an ethical worker and to be ethical, one must learn the ethics. It is none other that can best
embody worker’s ethics than ‘machine literacy’ for not only a worker must know how to operate
the machine, “he becomes appendage of the machine and it is only the most simple, most
monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him” as Marx and Engels
described.
Human literacy is diametrically opposed to machine literacy. If the latter functionally
teaches the ethics of industry and commoditized labor that enable the self to become the
instrumental part of capitalist machinery, the former then serves to acquaint one with the ethics
of human and humanistic labor that enable oneself to integrally participate in humanity. If the
latter is instrumental, conceiving text as readable only from an external objective in point of
view, the former then is substantive, in which all text are readable for their inherent meaning
irrespective of one’s utilitarian intention. If the latter is segmented, where the texts are finite to
one’s specialized, field interest, the former is transcendentally integrative, where texts are
infinite to the broad human interest. If the latter is regulatory, wherein texts are confined to a
system of power that alternates between controlling and conforming, the former then is
liberatory, wherein texts are part of the material structure that emancipate and resists hegemonic
control. If the latter is literal, approaching text for its singular meaning, statement and argument
as a given, then the former is literary, approaching texts for its semantic plurality leading into
deliberate selection of meanings, statements, and arguments. ‘Machine literacy’ is concerned
with efficiency, minimizing as much as possible the text and its meaning for maximum
productive, quantified output, whereas human literacy does not deny efficiency the output of
which is quality and in fact, complements them with appreciation for profundity.
The question now is, in the face of the force as formidable as the academia, with its
capitalist backing, how do we inculcate intellectual reading and how do we empower human
literacy among ourselves? As I have suggested in “Our Path: Forward”, Azhar Ibrahim’s
proposition of culture circle would be of great relevance to our endeavor. This is because, the
culture circle contained the property of emergent learning and pedagogy that allows intellectual
exploration and growth by mutual interactions. For alternative reading empowerment, such a
circle should be directed towards developing Robert Scholes’ canon of method. According to
Paul T. Corrigan, this canonization involves the reading pedagogy set around to the providing
and guiding of intellectual skills required for reading. This runs counter to the notion, canon of
texts in which the reading learning is undertaken through poring definite lists of textual
materials. Corrigan quoted Robert Scholes explaining that, “there is no point in introducing
students to the writing of Jacques Derrida, for example, if they finish their study unable to
deconstruct a text and unaware of the strengths—and the limitations—of deconstruction as a
way of reading and writing”. Developing canon of method, adds Corrigan, pertains to
simplification and clarification of reading methods ascertained from the field of English
literature and culture. Obviously, the scope of simplification and clarification should not be
limited to just the intellectual culture of the English, because high literary culture are identifiable
in many parts of the world. The dealbreaker is relevance to reading empowerment irrespective of
culture. Thus, by developing the canon of method through culture circle, I meant establishing
collective, emergent discourses on reading. There are two important implications of this First,
our understanding of reading as we learn discursively is not set in stone but conditional to our
intellectual engagement and relevance towards each other and the public community we are in.
Secondly, this is a filling in of both, intellectual and research gap of reading studies (excluding
the field of Malaysian literature), and culture in Malaysia that for years have lacked guiding
theoretical framework. By obscuring theories that can help us think about reading phenomena,
we ignore the complex reality of reading, and forgo the efficacy to make substantive progress in
intellectual reading empowerment.
Another important consideration regarding the culture circle is the material production
and distribution of texts itself. There ought to be periodic observation on circulation pattern of
the texts in our society, especially for our community. Obviously, this is due to the materialistic
nature of textual availability; texts are goods distributed by human labor for fellow human
consumption and hence, the nature of said distribution is contingent upon the nature of the
aforesaid consumption. According to Fadli Abdullah and Md Sidin Ahmad Ishak, books in
Malaysia are primarily sold and purchased in its physical form. The advent of digital technology
has contributed to the production of books in its digital version, but Malaysian consumer still
preferred physical books in the market. In fact, digital marketing has even elevated the sale of
books so much that many smaller, ‘indie’ book publishers are enabled to emerge and participate
in the book market. These small publishers cater to specific consumer interest, particularly those
demanding for high culture, intellectual genre. The implication of such development is the
presence of locally produced and managed intellectual books at a relatively affordable price.
However, some books, mostly internationally imported ones, and some local ones too, are sold at
a higher cost. Affordability here is truly relative. From our point of view, students as a class do
not earn any stable income on their own. They are in fact reliant on their family income to
subsist. Hence, from their perspective, many of the high-cost books are expensive and their
purchasing ability on books in general are limited. Only some students, whose family is
financially stable and relatively affluent can afford the books from time to time. This render
books distributed as commodity for private ownership not a sustainable and equitable source of
intellectual reading. This especially would impact students coming from the lower middle
income and low-income families, perpetuating intellectual inequality and thus growth of
intellectual community.
An alternative way would be capitulating upon a more equitable distribution of textual
material, and this would require us to take a look on the internet as the socio-technological realm
that makes it a possibility. As mentioned above, Fadli Abdullah and Md Sidin Ahmad Ishak
through their study of the technological impact on Malaysian publication industry has remarked
that the production of E-book is palpably marginal with the advent of the internet. On the
contrary, the internet has instead reinforced the marketing of physical books to the extent of
extending the market’s niche areas. Malaysian seems less receptive of commoditized digital
texts. However, various reading studies have indicated that Malaysian students rely much on the
internet to access their academic materials. Hence, the key to the material production and
distribution of intellectual texts, I believe, lies in the existing non-commoditizing and non-market
mechanism. Such a mechanism is founded upon the philosophy of openness, in that, in the words
of Aras Bozkurt “there is a strong need for open educational practices (OEP) and open
educational resources (OERS). Sharing has been a key motive and there has been a high
demand for open, free resources.” Many of these open educational resources, such as open
access journals are at our intellectual disposal.
A more controversial among these, are the site of Libgen and Sci Hub, that has been
criticized by some as the center of digital piracy of texts. These resources have long been used by
students for their academic purposes, which is ironic for this insinuate another manifestation of
academic ascetism: the inability of the education system to provide academic materials in
complete conventional sense thus resulting into their student’s procurement of the materials from
legally unorthodox resources. Here, we are confronted with the ideological crossroad of material
production and distribution. The theses at contention include the commoditization of reading
materials and the disputability of textual piracy. As I have attempted to show above, reading
commodification is problematic for its stratifying effect in knowledge distribution. This is best
demonstrated through Alexandra Elbakyan’s effort to ensure free and thus equitable distribution
of journal articles which were (and still are) freely harvested by journal publishers but distributed
at a cost of high profit margin for readers who need them. Many educational institute and
researchers from developing countries are legally and conventionally hindered from accessing
these articles, which Elbakyan’s Sci Hub project then helped to rectify. Elbakyan argued against
and challenged the notion of piracy as representing the capitalist notion of private ownership,
positing that “the very essence of copyright –that is, the concept of intellectual property– is
almost never questioned. That is, whether knowledge can be someone’s property is rarely
discussed”. Her ideological resolution to this problem is that “if there isn’t private property, then
there’s no basis for unequal distribution of wealth. In our case as well: if there’s no private
intellectual property and all scholarly publications are nationalized, then all people will have
equal access to knowledge.”
Consideration of textual material production and distribution substantiate Robert Scholes’
preference for canon of method over text. This is because in capitalist mode of production, some
of the text commodified are not accessible to those who could not afford for its exchange. If
these texts are canonized it would concretize the intellectual deprivation of these marginalized
group and accentuate intellectual inequality in society. Therefore, we should be critical towards
the notion that knowledge is fixedly contained within certain reading materials. Contrariwise,
ideas should always circulate, evolve, and disperse across time to meet the contextual need of
people. Thus, this warrants another material strategy which is public ownership of production
and distribution means. The culture circle must subsist intellectually through this strategy as it
expands and persists through age. It should aim to continuously produce intellectual texts,
containing ideas transmitted from other texts, but also diffused with its (i.e., their own) creative
insight. It meant establishing writing and reading platform that everybody can access. It also
meant rigorous promotion and persuasion for this platform to occupy the public attention since it
is contingent to the participation of all. In this regard, I think SOCAEITY has the potentiality to
serve this purpose well for it possess the advantage of being shared by the entire SOCA
community while at the same time accessible for other people as well. In fact, the series of
articles which I have penned and submitted here so far are preliminary, experimental attempts in
that direction. Where this attempt will grow into the fruition, only time will tell but the essence
of this proposition is that the emancipative material structure we are building for our own
intellectualism is determined by our collective agency; the solidarity, the discursive activities, the
composition and dissemination of texts are all constituent of our own productivity. Of course, to
truly resolve the problem of intellectualism, it would require socio-political change at the level of
the entire educational system and I am aware that my suggestion does not exactly and directly
address that. But the complexity of such problem requires solution of similar sophistication, and
hence, this essay and others written prior, would constitute the strategic start.
 References
1. “A Critical Conversation with Alexandra Elbakyan: Is she the Pirate Queen, Robin
Hood, a Scholarly Activist, or a Butterfly Flapping its Wings?” by Alexandra Elbakyan &
Aras Bozkurt
2. “Book Love: Attachment to Books in the United Kingdom” by María Angélica Thumala
Olave
3. “Elit Tradisi dan Reformasi di Asia Tenggara: Kumpulan Esei” by Shaharuddin Maaruf
4. “How Malaysia Reads: Individual, Home and School Initiatives” by Ambigapathy
Pandian
5. “How to Read a Book: The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading” by Mortimer. J. Adler
and Charles Van Doren
6. “Kesan Perkembangan Teknologi terhadap Industri Penerbitan Buku di Malaysia” by
Fadli Abdullah and Md Sidin Ahmad Ishak
7. “Literacy: A Social Skill” by Jacob L. Mey
8. “Our Path: Forward” by Muhammad Edham
9. “Reading Habit and Students’ Attitudes Towards Reading: A Study of Students in the
Faculty of Education UiTM Puncak Alam” by Jamiah Baba and Faiza Rostam Affendi
10. “Reading Habits and Attitudes of UMSKAL Undergraduates” by Shameem Ahmed
11. “Reading’s Many Branches: Robert Scholes’s ‘Canon of Methods’ ” by Paul T. Corrigan
12. “The ‘Mahasiswa’: An Intellectual Vision Reviewed” by Muhammad Edham
13. “The Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche
14. “The Will to Power” by Friedrich Nietzsche
15. “University, the Finger of the Visible Hand” by Muhammad Edham
16. “Why Science is better with Communism?” by Alexandra Elbakyan