Separate national service camps for boys and girls sounds logical but is it in the long-term interests of our future generation?
AFTER a two-year fact-finding mission, the Parliamentary Select Committee on Unity and National Service last week forwarded feedback from parents for separate national service camps for boys and girls. Some parents, having heard stories of free intermingling between the sexes, feared for their daughters.
Segregation by gender sounds logical in a predominantly Muslim country, and desirable too for non-Muslim parents. But is it in the long-term interests of our future generation?
As much as the national service goal is to expose our youths to one another's cultures, so is it intended to produce well-rounded adults?
Those who went to segregated boarding schools, found that the system produced shy boys and introverted girls. In isolated cases, the seeds of lesbianism and homosexuality also take root here. At the other extreme, the women in particular, emerge from same sex boarding schools overly sociable and are mistakenly labelled gatal (flirtatious).
By the time our youths enlist for national service, the trainees are actually at the upper end of childhood. Within the next 12 to 24 months, most would be entering college or university.
This is the 2000s, not the 1960s. At this age of raging hormones, some have started dating, and a few perhaps, even experimented with sex.
How are they to grow up into good parents if they are not exposed to the idiosyncrasies of one, and the rough and tumble of the other.
Indeed, segregation by the sexes is almost unnatural. Many trainees have actually grown up with brothers and sisters.
They may not appreciate one another as children but years later this bonding is priceless and is the basis of the Asian clan.
Moreover, in the NS programme's first two years, some of the predators were not fellow trainees but the pagar (fence) who were entrusted with guarding the precious padi – i.e. a score of the trainers themselves. Having trainers and trainees of the same sex may prevent this problem but at the same time it would deprive the girls of male authority figures, whom they would naturally gravitate to being girls.
Co-ed schools will make men out of boys and ladies out of girls.
Which leads me to a recent incident in Parliament. The two MPs who made such a muck of slurring fellow MP Fong Poh Kuan from Batu Gajah obviously had not a chivalrous bone in their body.
Kinabatangan MP Datuk Bung Mokhtar Radin and Jasin MP Datuk Mohd Said Yusof must have grown up on an all-male football field, with nary a sarong kebaya to temper their robust outlook on society.
Had two MPs grown up surrounded by sisters and other female kin, they would have realised that some things are normal biological functions and not a matter of jest.
But it also reflects a mindset.
Two decades, one would not have heard MPs making such crude remarks. Men were gentlemen then.
Parliament may have improved in terms of the quality of debate, but it has deteriorated in terms of the quality of some of its MPs. If they want to remain Yang Berhormat they might want to show a little respect to the nation's voters – half of whom are women.
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