Fellow Luyechun Daw Thuza Shein, Dawsann Myint with Dr. Nyi Nyi at Cafe SS Food on 2-2-13
Part 2 — MERIT, APTITUDE AND THE MAKING OF PROFESSIONALS
When education began to measure people by numbers — and sometimes by things other than merit
Part 1 examined the educational environment inherited by independent Burma and the beginning of the great restructuring after 1962. Part 2 looks more closely at merit, professional selection, Dr Nyi Nyi’s educational vision, the ILA experiment, and the human consequences of replacing individual aptitude with increasingly centralised systems.
A talented student was not necessarily expected to become a doctor
One of the most important lessons from the earlier generation of Myanmar education is easy to forget today:
High academic achievement did not automatically mean Medicine or Engineering.
A young person could be brilliant in science and become a scientist.
Another could excel in languages and become a teacher, writer or scholar.
Someone else might discover an aptitude for administration, technical work or education.
A person could even change direction during his or her education.
My own family provides two examples.
My father-in-law initially studied Anatomy but eventually lost interest in it. He changed direction and entered Education, eventually obtaining BA, B.Ed and BES qualifications. He was sent to Australia for further training and later served as a Headmaster and District Education Officer.
My father’s younger brother had wanted to continue medical education, but the Second World War interrupted his studies. Our family’s sawmill and teak business was also destroyed during the conflict.
He joined the Railway instead.
He passed internal examinations, received training with the Indian Railways and eventually became a foreman responsible for coach repair and painting at Myitnge. Through professional examinations, experience and competence, he eventually rose to a position senior to some younger engineering graduates.
Neither man’s life was a failure because he did not follow the conventional professional route.
Quite the opposite.
Their stories taught me that merit can reveal itself in many forms.
The purpose of education is not to manufacture prestigious professions
A country certainly needs doctors.
It needs engineers.
But it also needs teachers, scientists, technicians, mechanics, skilled tradespeople, administrators, nurses, farmers, entrepreneurs and countless other professionals.
The fundamental question should therefore be:
What can this particular young person become exceptionally good at?
Not simply:
What profession has the highest prestige?
And certainly not:
Which profession can make the most money?
This distinction became increasingly important as Myanmar’s educational system became more centralised.
Dr Nyi Nyi — the mentor I never stopped admiring
Here I must make something absolutely clear.
I have sometimes discussed the policies associated with Dr Nyi Nyi’s era critically.
That does not mean that I became anti–Dr Nyi Nyi.
I never did.
I have never stopped loving and admiring him, and I will continue to do so until I die.
As a young Luyechun, I regarded him as a mentor.
Although he was a high-ranking government official, he personally came to the Luyechun camp year after year.
He was an impressive speaker.
He possessed extraordinarily broad general knowledge.
And I personally witnessed something that left a permanent impression on me.
The Luyechun town hall
There were more than 100 Outstanding Students gathered at the camp.
We were not an ordinary audience.
Many had repeatedly achieved excellent examination results, and General Knowledge was itself one of our examination subjects.
On one occasion, Dr Nyi Nyi and several journalists and authors participated in something resembling a town-hall meeting.
The principle was simple:
Ask questions. They would answer.
Sometimes journalists or authors found themselves in difficult situations when the students asked tricky questions.
Then Dr Nyi Nyi took the microphone.
For perhaps two or three hours, he continued answering.
Question after question.
Until the students were satisfied.
I was astonished.
How could one man know so much?
That is the Dr Nyi Nyi I remember.
And that is why, when I discuss the educational policies of his era, I do so with affection, respect and gratitude, not hatred.
His vision: Burma needed scientists
At the Luyechun camp, Dr Nyi Nyi spoke passionately about the need for Burma to develop its own scientific capacity.
He warned us about doctors leaving the country after receiving their education.
He used the powerful word “traitors.”
To him, educated young people were a national investment.
If Burma paid to educate them, Burma needed them to return that investment by serving the country.
That argument was not irrational.
Indeed, it contained an important truth:
A developing country cannot afford to lose all of its best-trained people.
The difficulty was how to retain them.
The special Pure Science scholarship
Dr Nyi Nyi encouraged Outstanding Students to choose pure science — particularly Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.
He promised a special scholarship of approximately K200 per month, compared with the ordinary scholarship level that I remember as around K75 per month.
At that time, this was a very substantial amount.
The promise of further education abroad, including PhD opportunities, made the idea even more attractive.
I was fascinated.
I wanted to apply for Physics.
But my Physics mark was only around 74, according to my recollection.
So I decided to apply for Chemistry instead.
Then my family intervened.
My parents cried and asked me to choose Medicine
My parents, grandparents and relatives strongly urged me to choose Medicine.
Some of them even cried.
They wanted me to become a doctor.
At the time, I was torn between my own interest in pure science and my family’s wishes.
Eventually, I chose Medicine.
Today, after more than half a century, I can say:
I thank my parents, grandparents and relatives.
Because my life as a doctor eventually became something much deeper than merely following a prestigious career.
It became a vocation.
But I did not understand that immediately.
The ILA system: an ambitious attempt to standardise merit
At precisely this period, Myanmar was conducting another enormous educational experiment.
The Intelligence Level Aggregate (ILA) system was used for university admission from 1964 to 1968. Five matriculation subjects could contribute up to 20 ILA points each.
The purpose was not necessarily malicious.
There was a genuine problem to solve.
Raw marks in different subjects were not distributed equally.
A very high Mathematics score might be much more common than an equally high Burmese or English score.
So the system attempted to convert marks into a standardised index.
In principle:
standardisation = greater fairness.
But there is always another question:
Does a formula designed to make students comparable actually measure the abilities that matter for the profession they are entering?
My own experience of ILA
I was one of the students caught in the final ILA period.
I obtained:
Mathematics — 100
Chemistry — 99
According to my recollection, my raw aggregate placed me second at the Institute of Medicine, Mandalay.
But under ILA, my position was reportedly around 13th.
I cannot now reproduce the exact conversion table, so I will not claim a particular mathematical equivalence such as “80 = 100” as an established fact.
But I remember the effect very clearly.
Exceptional raw marks could be compressed into a much narrower ILA range.
And that mattered when Luyechun preliminary selection was being made.
The contemporary historical record confirms that 1968 was the final year of ILA, and that the system would be abandoned for university admissions thereafter.
The highest ILA scorer was not necessarily the best doctor
I also remember a fellow student whom I will deliberately leave unnamed.
He came from the Arts stream and achieved the highest ILA ranking, receiving Roll No. 1.
He entered Medicine.
But Medicine ultimately was not the right path for him.
He left medical education and later changed to an Arts programme at Mandalay Arts and Science University.
There is absolutely no shame in that.
He may have been an excellent person with excellent intellectual ability.
The point is something else:
The highest composite examination ranking does not necessarily identify the person best suited to a particular profession.
This is why aptitude and interest matter.
A brilliant Arts student should not be forced into Medicine simply because an index ranks him first.
And a brilliant science student should not be pushed into Medicine simply because society regards it as prestigious.
The difference between merit and suitability
This distinction is often overlooked.
An examination can measure knowledge.
It can measure preparation.
It can sometimes measure analytical ability.
But it cannot perfectly measure:
- compassion;
- practical aptitude;
- perseverance;
- emotional resilience;
- communication;
- curiosity;
- professional motivation;
- manual skills;
- leadership;
- or whether a person will actually enjoy the work.
These qualities matter enormously in Medicine.
They matter in Engineering.
They matter in teaching.
They matter in almost every profession.
Therefore:
Academic merit is important — but academic merit is not identical to professional suitability.
And then came my first week of Surgery
I eventually entered Medicine.
But when I began my housemanship in Surgery, I discovered something that no examination had prepared me for.
During my first week, I became severely distressed.
I saw:
- serious injuries;
- fractures;
- assault wounds;
- severely burned patients;
- operations;
- blood and suffering;
- and the enormous responsibility of dealing with human lives.
In those days, under the medical practices of the Ne Win era, surgery could involve cutting and stitching with little or no local anaesthetic in circumstances where modern practice would be very different.
I became so depressed that I could hardly eat or sleep.
I began to wonder whether I had chosen the wrong profession.
Then Pollyanna came to my rescue
There was one book I had read perhaps 50 times:
Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter.
Whenever I became depressed, sad, angry — even when I struggled with God — I returned to that book.
Its central philosophy helped me look for something positive even in difficult circumstances.
And suddenly I realised:
I was not cutting people because I hated them.
I was cutting them because I was trying to save them.
I was not stitching wounds because I wanted people to suffer.
I was stitching them because I wanted them to heal.
That simple realisation changed me.
I began to see Surgery differently.
The pain was not the purpose.
The purpose was healing.
From medical student to medical professional
Then came another transformation.
Being a medical student was one thing.
Becoming a doctor responsible for patients, nurses, sisters, fellow doctors and senior colleagues was another.
I had to learn how to communicate.
How to listen.
How to deal with difficult personalities.
How to cooperate.
How to lead without humiliating others.
How to influence without forcing.
Another book became important in this transformation:
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.
I read it repeatedly — perhaps 50 times — and made my own notes and practical points.
Those lessons helped me enormously in my transition from student to working medical professional.
Looking back, I consider both books gifts that helped transform me.
And above all:
I thank Allah SWT for enlightening me.
The tragedy of a system that confuses prestige with talent
This is where my personal story returns to the larger question.
My parents were not wrong to want me to become a doctor.
They loved me.
Medicine was a respected profession.
And, fortunately, I eventually discovered that I could love it too.
But that does not mean every high-scoring student should become a doctor.
Nor does it mean that someone who becomes a plumber, carpenter, railway technician, teacher or skilled craftsman is less valuable.
Indeed, modern societies have repeatedly rediscovered this truth.
Australia, for example, has periodically encouraged young people to consider vocational and technical careers rather than assuming that university is the only route to success. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott argued that young Australians should choose careers according to their abilities and interests, rather than treating university as the only path.
The principle is universal:
Do not manufacture professions. Develop people.
But the ILA story was only part of a much larger transformation
The educational changes after 1962 were not confined to examination formulas.
The 1964 reforms reorganised the universities themselves.
The two major national universities — Rangoon and Mandalay — were broken up into specialised institutions and colleges. The University of Yangon records the major restructuring of this period and the subsequent changes to the curriculum and medium of instruction.
Dr Nyi Nyi himself later explained in a 1994 interview that he had considerable freedom in shaping many educational reforms and that military leaders sought his advice because they lacked expertise in education.
This is important.
It means we should not reduce the entire transformation to:
“Ne Win ordered everything and Dr Nyi Nyi merely obeyed.”
The historical record is more complicated.
Dr Nyi Nyi himself said he had substantial policy space.
At the same time, he was working within an authoritarian political structure.
Both facts can be true.
And Dr Nyi Nyi himself later became part of the tragedy
This is perhaps the most painful irony of all.
The man who taught us that educated people should remain and serve Burma eventually experienced the consequences of the political environment around him.
According to a later account based partly on an interview with Dr Nyi Nyi himself, after TIME magazine featured him among Asian future leaders in 1974, rumours circulated about his Chinese ancestry. He was removed from the Mines ministry and sent to Canberra as ambassador. The same account records his observation that “family background and ties mattered” to Ne Win.
I want to be absolutely clear:
I do not write this against Dr Nyi Nyi.
I still love him.
I still admire him.
I will continue to do so until I die.
Rather, his own later experience makes the history more human.
The teacher and the student
Dr Nyi Nyi warned us:
Do not leave Burma.
I eventually left Burma.
But I did not leave because I hated my country.
I did not leave for fun.
I did not leave because I wanted to abandon the people.
I felt that the system had increasingly rejected people like me.
I experienced being called “Kalar.”
Another person of Chinese background whom I remember also experienced a very different form of exclusion, being identified as “Tayoke.”
These labels mattered.
They told people, implicitly or explicitly:
You are not quite one of us.
And when a country repeatedly tells educated people that they do not fully belong, eventually some of them will leave.
Who, then, is the “traitor”?
This is the question that has stayed with me for decades.
If a doctor leaves because he is offered a better life abroad, is he automatically a traitor?
If a scientist leaves because his research opportunities have disappeared, is he a traitor?
If a minority professional leaves because he feels discriminated against, is he a traitor?
If an educated citizen leaves because the political system no longer allows him to live and work with dignity, is he a traitor?
Perhaps we need to ask a different question:
What did the country do to make that person want to leave?
Patriotism cannot be sustained by accusation alone.
A country retains its people by giving them reasons to stay.
The lesson of Dr Nyi Nyi
For me, Dr Nyi Nyi’s life therefore contains a profound lesson.
He wanted Burma to produce educated citizens.
He wanted scientists.
He wanted doctors to serve the country.
He wanted young people to develop their abilities.
He personally inspired many of us.
And yet the system surrounding those aspirations eventually became increasingly restrictive.
The lesson is not that his desire was wrong.
The lesson is that good intentions require good institutions.
A scholarship cannot replace academic freedom.
An examination system cannot replace aptitude.
A patriotic speech cannot replace opportunity.
And an order not to leave cannot replace a genuine reason to remain.
From Brain Drain to Brain Return
This is why I now think differently about migration.
The greatest victory for Myanmar would not be to build a prison from which nobody can leave.
It would be to build a country from which people are free to leave — but freely choose to return.
Let our doctors train abroad.
Let our engineers learn overseas.
Let our scientists work in international laboratories.
Let our students learn languages.
Let them acquire technology, capital, experience and contacts.
Then create a Myanmar peaceful and prosperous enough that they say:
“Now I want to come home.”
That is not brain drain.
That is brain recycle.
Like salmon returning upstream to their birthplace.
