How to Discuss Education Public Policy

(original post)
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In the last 48-hours you may have read a very large number of thoughts by individuals on the subject of Education in Malaysia. In order to help us organise all of these thoughts, I propose a brief framework as follows. You may think of this as a "philosophy of education," which may be useful in sorting through the noisy (and appropriately so) discourse on educational public policy.
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1. Note that the purpose of "education," on a national scale, is to create FUNCTIONAL CITIZENS.
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2. In order to be functional, an educated citizen must be able to interact meaningfully with the official and unofficial LAWS of the nation. The OFFICIAL law is written explicitly, and thus documented in a formal canon (5. below); the UNOFFICIAL law, which may be called 'adat,' or 'culture,' or 'common sense,' consists of a fluid set of assumption which is never static (6. below).
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3. Therefore the focus of national education is FIRST and foremost to enable isolated human bodies, to INTERACT with other bodies on the matters above. It is of SECONDARY concern that anyone becomes an EXPERT in any area of knowledge. We can address the secondary concern in a future note, but the rest of this note focuses on the _primary concern_.
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4. We are concerned then, with determining an OBJECTIVE STANDARD for GENERAL EDUCATION, that which should be regarded as a basic requirement for adult citizens capable of INFLUENCING matters of GOVERNMENT. Thereby under current voting limits, we can work around a target educational period of 21 years per citizen. What must 21-year-old Malaysians know?
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5. In order to interact with official laws: a few domains of LITERACY come into play. 5.1. Citizens must be able to read, comprehend, implement compliance with, and argue about compliance with the written law; for example, IF the law is officially in the Malay _language_, then the Malay language must be mastered TO SUCH AN EXTENT DESCRIBED ABOVE, and lesser degrees of mastery must be considered failure to properly educate a citizen. 5.2. Citizens must also be sufficiently _quantitatively_ literate in order to engage with the law by the standard above. 5.3. Citizens must also be sufficiently _informatically_ literate in order to be able to obtain for their readings, and reference, the laws of the land (including local council bylaws). 5.4. Citizens must also be sufficiently _politically_ literate in order to understand where the written laws come from, and how they can be changed by the citizen herself. SUMMARY: we now have a means to determine standards of grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, government, information literacy, etc. which must be achieved by citizens by the age of 21 years.
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6. In order to interact with adat, culture, and common Malaysian sense, other types of LITERACY are required: we must have the subjects of current affairs, social involvement ("clubs and societies"), history, anthropology ("alam dan manusia," / "geography" were the terms at some point), segmented by RACE, segmented by RELIGION, segmented by periods of TIME, and administered via an expicitly INTERSECTIONAL methodology, which exercises each child in the differences between the parts, and wholes, of the Malaysian experience.
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7. I will further venture that 5. takes PRECEDENCE OVER 6., and that resource allocations must obey this order of precedence to a non-trivial degree, such that 5. should be administered more urgently than 6. throughout the life of a child (any citizen below the age of 21 years). Both remain important, but for the sake of operational urgency, and due to the realities of resource limitations, this order of precedence is preferred.
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Disclaimer: this note was hammered out on a small piece of glass, while I waited for a friend to regain consciousness. It reflects my personal appreciation of the subject of education, and does not constitute a professional opinion, nor does it pretend to be research. EVERYONE seems to have an opinion on the new Ministerial Appointment for education, because everyone tends to feel that having gone through the torment which is, "education," they have valuable insight into the subject matter. Those are valid points of view. I say "torment," because by definition, education really is brainwashing, the very process whereby each and every society ensure that new meat behaves compliantly with the protocols and common assumptions of that society.