It is not so much a question of “yes” or “no” to state interventionism in national economy building but how well a state manages national economy building, societal building and citizen empowerment within powerful global dynamics, all at the same time. A national education system in the old format is out of sync with the accelerated learning processes that are now available in global education. Looking back, Malaysian nation-building was a process of blind centralisation, stimulated by the notion that building Malaysia meant making its population as uniform as possible in their experience of governmental power. A reset for Malaysia, to be serious and substantive, must thus see at least three things coming to pass. First is a shift in national narrative from nation-building (meaning centralisation) to federation-building (meaning strong state governments more easily answerable to the voting public).
