On the bravery of imagination, the freedom to be wrong, and the weight of shattered ambitions
Baru-baru ni surau kami anjurkan ceramah Maulidur Rasul. Macam biasalah, ustaz bagi tazkirah istimewa mengenai Rasulullah SAW. Aku, sebagai AJK, duduk kat depan sekali nak kawal budak-budak yang meragam tak tahu diam.
Towards the end of the ceramah, ada seorang budak lelaki, umur dalam 5 tahun, tiba-tiba toleh ke belakang dan tanya kawan dia:
“Allah lahir bulan berapa?”
Aku terpaksa buat muka garang sambil tahan gelak. It was pure, uncorrupted curiosity. The kind of innocent bravery that only exists before the world tells you how to think.
Because creativity, at its core, is the freedom to be wrong.
“Hari ni tema lukisan bebas,” kata cikgu seni aku, Mr. Harim, berpuluh tahun yang lepas.
I drew a padi field. The irony is, I lived in a FELDA settlement surrounded by oil palm, not padi. In my drawing, the field sat at the foot of a mountain. And on top of that mountain, I drew snow. Like Mount Fuji.
I got the idea from a calendar my father bought at the FELDA shop—the exact same calendar hanging in almost every house in FELDA Bukit Waha. December was Japan.
I was deep in the zone, coloring the mountain peak white, when something knocked hard against my head. I genuinely thought a rock had hit me. It was Mr. Harim’s hand.
“Mana kau belajar salji ada kat sawah padi?”
I shrank into my seat, embarrassed, as the whole class laughed.
Well, Cikgu—Japan has paddy fields too. I only found that out once I was an adult.
Years later, I watched Sir Ken Robinson’s famous TED Talk, How Schools Kill Creativity. One line hit me like a train:
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’re not able to come up with anything original.”
Watching it, something in me lit up with purpose. I promised myself I wouldn’t let the system do to my daughter what it did to me. But the system is brutally efficient.
“Maryam tak suka sekolah PASTI. Maryam tak enjoy.”
Even in Year 5, Maryam would say this whenever we passed her old kindergarten. Because she brought it up so often, I finally pushed for the real conversation.
“Kenapa Maryam tak suka? Sekolah PASTI kan best, ada main-main.”
“Kan Maryam masa tu umur 5 tahun, baru belajar menulis,” the words started spilling out of her. “Cikgu kata tulisan Maryam macam belacan. Lepas tu dia kata, dah la, awak jangan tulis lagi. Lepas tu dia ambik buku Maryam, tunjuk kat depan kelas.”
“Ehh, tak sepatutnya cikgu buat macam tu,” I said, genuinely upset.
“Masa nak warnakan matahari tu—Maryam buatlah warna oren. Lepas tu cikgu marah, dia kata ni bukan warna matahari. Kan dia cikgu, Abi? Kalau Maryam salah, bagitahu je lah warna apa yang betul.”
I sat frozen. A moment the teacher probably forgot the next day had left a permanent scar on a 5-year-old’s confidence.
In his lecture, Sir Ken Robinson talked about a little girl drawing a picture of God. Her teacher told her, “Nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl answered without missing a beat: “They will in a minute.”
The kid in the surau asking when God was born. The boy drawing a snow-capped mountain on a tropical padi field. The girl drawing the face of God. Maryam painting an orange sun.
They were creative, free, and brave. They were completely unafraid of being wrong.
And then institutions step in. Lazy teachers who demand compliance over curiosity. Self-absorbed adults projecting their own shattered ambitions onto kids. We systematically crush their imagination, demand conformity, and call it “education.”
I wanted to protect Maryam’s creativity from the system. But the truth is, her father’s creativity was killed 40 years before she was even born.