Reverse the rot in national education

QUESTION TIME | There is much anecdotal evidence that Malaysia’s standard of education has dipped over the years especially following the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the rapid introduction of Malay into the education system from the 1970s onwards.

Although such a decline is difficult to document, there is some evidence for this from the scores of Pisa, or Program for International Student Assessment, the only such assessment available for those countries which participate in this survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or OECD.

This was clearly indicated in the 2012 scores for Pisa which showed that even as Singapore topped the scores, the results for Malaysia were appalling, coming out 52 overall out of 65 countries and lagging behind countries such as Thailand, Kazakhstan and Iran.

For the 2015 Pisa scores, Malaysia claimed that it had made major progress but it turned out that it had not even been included in the results for various reasons as pointed out by DAP leader Lim Kit Siang in his blog.

MP Ong Kian Meng said, quoting the Pisa report, this was due to the following: "In Malaysia, the Pisa assessment was conducted in accordance with the operational standards and guidelines of the OECD. However, the weighted response rate among the initial sample Malaysian schools (51 percent) falls well short of the standard Pisa response rate of 85 percent. Therefore, the results may not be comparable to those of other countries or to results for Malaysia from previous years."

Not only was Malaysia’s standards in terms of reading, science and maths appalling, the Education Ministry was trying to cover it up!

A number of factors were responsible for the slow and steady decline of the Malaysian educational system. Let’s go back in history and try and identify the main reasons why this happened.

1. From English to Malay. The first was the hasty reversal of English as the medium of instruction in national schools. The NEP and the rise in Malay nationalism dictated the national language policy of the time that Malay be progressively introduced into the national education system.

Ironically, in the 70s when he was education minister, this was spearheaded by none other than Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of 22 years who is now opposition leader.

Mahathir reintroduced English for the teaching of science and maths in 2003, the last year he was prime minister, but this policy was reversed by none other than his political bedfellow now and then education minister and deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin in July 2009, barely three months after Najib Razak became prime minister.

English was apparently good for Umno ministers and their children but not good enough for the mass of Malays who went to national schools and whose subsequent chance of employment in the private sector and advancing their knowledge was impeded by their poor English.

Until today, many of the top Malays were those who received an English education either here or overseas or both. Numerous Malays have said publicly that good knowledge of English enabled them to rise up the career ladder and many Malay parents want their children to be educated in English.

2. Increasing the number of Malay teachers. The other thing the government in the 70s did was to accelerate the process of hiring Malay teachers into the national educational system. For this, the standards were dropped. Candidates with a poor grade at the Malaysia Certificate of Education level could train to become primary school teachers for instance. That resulted in a deterioration of teaching standards with consequent effects on children.

3. Increasing Islamisation in schools. Islamic norms were being increasingly introduced into national schools. Extreme examples include non-Muslim students being forced to eat in toilets at break times during the Muslim fasting month. Also, history teaching was being distorted by asserting as facts some things which were not accepted as such by history academics. Many non-Muslims, including non-Muslim teachers, were upset by this and began to shun national schools.

Exodus to vernacular schools

These factors combined with others and the resulting drop over the years of standards in national schools led to an exodus to vernacular schools, especially Chinese schools and to private schools for those who could afford it, resulting in a cleaved education system where students in the national system received poorer quality education.

Meantime government universities dropped minimum educational standards and tinkered with the qualifying system to enable more Malays to enter universities and produced hundreds of thousands of graduates who could not be employed because their competence was poor. University education was no longer a passport to a better life.

That, in a nutshell, is the abbreviation of a more complex story of a national educational system in slow rot with successive governments not having the political will to reverse the decay and take the educational system to a higher level.

What is required is de-politicisation of the national education system and an exclusive focus on improving quality which starts from better-trained teachers, more independence from politics, better leadership and a clear guideline. The last may be served by the Education Blueprint now in place for 2013-2025.

It would include amongst others the true will to educate all Malaysians so that they are in a position to benefit from a full range of educational opportunities and contribute to the development of the country. English should be reintroduced at least for subjects such as science and maths and other more technical subjects because access to further knowledge is dependent on a good command of the language.

This is a project that will take decades before a return to high educational standards is achieved but it is absolutely imperative for the future of this country. We are quickly losing our relative advantage to other countries and we need to change merely to keep pace, let alone be on top of others.

Singapore is a prime example of how a focused non-political emphasis on quality political education can achieve great results with it now topping Pisa scores. Our education standards in 1965 were broadly similar to theirs. Singapore has just one educational system, compared to several for ours, and the medium of instruction is English while it guarantees all mother-tongue education.

Successive governments, including the current one, have utterly failed us in education. They don’t have the guts and the vision to do the needful but seem to be, wittingly or unwittingly, keeping the majority of the population under-educated and unfit in terms of the skills and thinking needed for economic, personal and yes, even political development.

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P GUNASEGARAM does believe that education maketh a man - and woman. Email: t.p.guna@gmail.com. Mkini