It wasn’t until I was permitted and encouraged to think for myself that my education truly began. So, my formal education actually began in college when I signed up for English literature.

Before that, the sum of what I learned from my primary and secondary education in Malaysia was that as a student I was supposed to regurgitate whatever I was ‘taught’. By ‘taught’, I mean uncritical rote learning. Information was shovelled and shoved down my mind’s throat. Learning was drudgery and memorisation. The closer our assignments and answers reflected the curriculum, the more intelligent we were supposed to be. The better we did that, the higher we scored. Intelligence was measurable. Grades accurately reflected our intelligence. The lower we scored, the stupider we were.

Original thought and innovation had no place in our education. I suffered greatly under that approach.

An example that sums up that attitude to education was an incident in maths class when I was in secondary school at Bukit Bintang Boys School. I hated maths. My father had to threaten to burn my prized comic collection in primary school to motivate me to memorise my twelve times table. I remember it until today. It was seared into my soul. In retrospect, it was actually pretty effective. But it wasn’t sustainable.

Because I failed to learn math in school, I was sent to be tutored by Mr Nadarajah, whom we called Mr Nada. He was reputed to be able to inspire and improve students who had no inclination or talent for maths. He had a reputation for turning ugly ducklings to swans. And I was one butt ugly duckling. My previous tutors my mother hired did not improve me in the slightest. I remained hideous at it despite their best efforts.

I confirmed Mr Nada’s reputation. In my short time with him, I went from scraping Es to batting As. I never looked back. After him, I never received anything less than an A (well, except for Add Maths in college, but he was no longer my tutor by then). He inspired a love for maths in me, which, looking back, I found miraculous since, as I said, hated it. No, I despised it. I was the visual and literary bent. Even though I loved fiction and fantasy, numbers were an impenetrable fiction and a useless fantasy to me. So powerful was his influence that I even entertained the idea of taking a dual degree for it.

Mr Nada’s bait was to teach us shortcuts. He seemed to have the shortest, and most elegant, way to solve a problem. If the conventional method, which was inevitably the one the school taught, had six steps, he showed us how to do it in three. That delighted me to no end. It was as if after driving around in a broken down car for years, I was suddenly given a gleaming new, fast one. Mr Nada showed us there was more than one way to approach a problem, and better ones abound.

His most important lesson was how to approach a problem. It sounds elementary, but so are most important things. First, understand the problem. Really understand it. The germ of the answer was contained in it. Next, set out each step of working clearly. Each step had to be a logical progression from the last. Take it step by step. Don’t rush. Double check the working. Then revise it to remove any superfluousness where possible. If I did that all that, the answer would naturally follow.

To this day, I apply this approach to my legal work; keeping things elementary, checking each progressive proposition, eschewing unnecessary complexity. Aiming for simplicity as I avoided the simplistic. The great physcist Richard Feynman said, ‘You can always recognise truth by its beauty and simplicity.’ and ‘The truth always turns out to be simpler than you thought.’ The incompetent and ignorant conflate the impression of complexity with intelligence. I have this regrettable habit of thinking people who inject needless complexity stupid. It’s not fair but old habits die hard.

After a few years of Mr Nada’s tuition, I was rather competent at maths. What many took half an hour, I took less. With his training and drilling, I blazed through maths questions. That was what got me into trouble.

The math teacher gave us a set of questions to practice for her teaching period. That was the time I was hooked on reading. So after I finished the questions with a fair bit of time to spare, I pulled out my book out of my bag and started quietly reading. I forget what book it was, but it was around my Stephen King period. After several pages in, she rudely interrupted me.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked loudly hands on hip, her face arranged to convey a disapproving, annoyed look. We sat in pairs. My partner kept his head down and continued his work. The rest of the class turned to look.

‘I am reading a book.’ I thought it strange for her to ask the obvious.

‘Why are you reading? You are supposed to be doing your questions.’

‘I finished dy, teacher.’

‘Oh, you so clever is it?’

‘No? I thought I could read since I finished them.’

‘Okay, since you are so clever, go to the board and do question twenty five. Show us how you did it. Put away your book. If I see you reading again during class I will confiscate your book.’

That was supposed to be the most challenging question of the lot. I rose up hesitatingly. As I walked to the board, I felt ashamed, as if I did something wrong. I could hear the snickers and feel my classmates eyes on me. I thought she was unfair. I had finish my work quickly. I did not disrupt the class. Why was I being punished? She followed behind me. When we reached the board she handed me a stick of white chalk.

‘Show us.’

I wrote the question and the working beneath it. It was short. After finishing, I looked at the board and mentally double checked it again. It was as I had written it down in my exercise book.

‘That’s not how I taught you to do it. Who taught you that?’

‘My tuition teacher.’

‘That is wrong. You must do it the way I taught you. This is how you do it.’

She picked up the chalk and wrote her working next to mine. It was longer and had additional steps. The answer was the same. I was confused. Shorter better, no?

‘You do it the way I taught you, understand?’

I nodded and returned to my desk with my head hung. In that moment the dim awareness that authority demanded conformity, even when it wasn’t effective or efficient emerged. School was about form, not substance. Learning was imitation, not understanding. What we were taught was more important than what we thought.

It was only in college, in an entirely different subject – English Literature – that I finally experienced education as it should be: the exploration and development of thought. Twelve years of school and not once was my opinion ever asked.

When it finally came, I was stunned.

‘What do you think this poem is about, Fahri?’

I was inarticulate and awkward. I wasn’t used to speaking my mind in a classroom. I fumbled, stumbled, and my answer was spectacularly wrong. I read only books then, without nuance. I knew only of rhymes, not poems. I thought they were the same thing. I scored three out of ten for my first essay. I think two marks were for encouragement and one was for being one of three guys that signed up (and later the only remaining one). The rest of the class were girls.

Education isn’t about memorising facts or slavishly adhering to formulas. It’s about the ability to think, question, and understand the world in our own terms. That is the foundation of learning.

It was with that question that my formal education truly began.