Muhyiddin doesn't even know what he's talking about, no wonder our education system in a MESS

According to press coverage of Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin’s working visit to Japan, he is reported to have hailed our education system as a role model for other nations.

Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, was quoted as saying that “the Malaysian government's focus on development of education has not only helped her population in the development of the country but has also assisted other countries to emulate similar success.”

Funnily enough, the Deputy Prime Minister’s exaltation of our education system comes less than a week after he had sensationally expressed “shock” over the poor performance of Malaysian students in international assessments such as the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), despite “huge funds being pumped into the education sector.”

So, which is it? Surely, our education system cannot be both shockingly bad and a role model to be emulated by other countries at the same time? It would appear that Muhyiddin cannot make up his mind.

Flip-flop decisions and misplaced priorities

Ironically, Muhyiddin’s contradictory and indecisive stand is a sad reflection of the state of Malaysian education. Perhaps more than any other sector, our education policies are well known to suffer from contradictory and indecisive decision-making, a fact that has compromised the development of our country.

Take, for example, the Teaching and Learning of Mathematics and Science in English (PPSMI) programme that was introduced in 2003. After billions of ringgit was invested in computer hardware, teacher training and a change of syllabi, the programme was unceremoniously discontinued in 2012.

Meanwhile, the controversial School-Based Assessment (PBS) system had an even shorter lifespan. Introduced in 2011 as a tool that would help evaluate student performance in a “fairer” manner, it soon became an administrative burden for teachers, many of whom had to stay up till wee hours of the morning in order to key in student data. Barely three years later, the Ministry announced a total revamp of the system.

And then we have the renewed efforts to raise the level of English proficiency amongst our students, including making English a compulsory paper to pass in the SPM examination by 2016. While any effort to improve our students’ deteriorating level of English is applauded, the fact is that such drastic moves would have been completely unnecessary had there not been a conscious decision to relegate English to an unimportant subject to begin with. As a result of overzealous nationalism, education ministers in the 1970s began dismantling our legacy of quality English education, a price that will continue to be paid by generations of Malaysians.

Besides flip-flop policy-making, another problem faced by our education system is the Government’s penchant for spending on unnecessary infrastructure. While Muhyiddin is right to say that education expenditure is a priority item in Malaysia, he failed to mention that a lot of the money is allocated to white elephant investments such as the problematic RM4.1 billion 1BestariNet project that the Parliamentary Accounts Committee has now said should be scrapped in light of its poor delivery.[2]

Worse, IT expenditure appears to have increased at the expense of teacher development programmes, which saw a shortfall of RM350 million compared to last year. This exemplifies the Government’s misplaced priorities, considering the fact that teachers are the most critical component in the delivery of education services.

Let’s face it – we should be doing much better

Muhyiddin was also quoted to have said that our “national education system has produced many intellectuals in almost all fields such as doctors and engineers and that is a reason why Malaysia has progressed into an almost developed nation.”

Granted, we have achieved much development over the years, having progressed from a low-income nation to a middle-income one. However, it is also true that we have hit a roadblock in terms of our development. According to the World Bank, we are now stuck in what is known as the middle-income trap, which means that we are not developing fast enough to catch-up with the advanced economies. Meanwhile, countries such as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, all of which had lower GDP per capita compared to us fifty years ago, have all graduated into high-income nations.

Let’s face it – the quality of our education system should be so much better than it is. However, until we get our priorities right and invest in areas that really matter rather than on white elephant projects and making arbitrary policy decisions out of political expediency, we will never get it right.

Zairil Khir Johari

Member of Parliament for Bukit Bendera

DAP Assistant National Publicity Secretary