Education minister should resign over his latest statement

Most Malaysians would agree with me that, while it is true that the country’s first prime minister Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra Al-Haj, who was also Umno president, woke up this morning, the Bapa Malaysia would be shocked to see how far right Umno has veered the country into.

The fact that Tunku agreed to be known as Bapa Malaysia instead of Bapa Umno is clearly a slap in the face of people in the likes of Jamal Mohd Yunos during the Tunku’s era.

Now, when Education Minister Mahdzir Khalid can say, without even blinking his eyes, that the recent Putrajaya primary school function “neither political nor unusual”, I am not surprised that the country and our education system have indeed gone to the dogs.

When Umno songs and Umno flags were being flown on the school grounds at what was said to be not an Umno event, I wonder how a discotheque will be like when all the disco songs are not played.

I dread to think what would happen to our education system, with schools now being dragged into becoming another political arena by the people in the powers of the corridor. It has already happened in mosques, as some claim.

Every hope I have to see the education system in the country being reformed has been dashed against the rocks with this latest remark by Mahdzir (photo) in his capacity as education minister.

Accord Dr M that same privileges

I dare Mahdzir to officially invite former prime minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad (or even former education minister, Muhyiddin Yasin) to use the school facilities to make their circuit to Umno strongholds to address the rot in the country’s education system and how the Malays in rural areas can catch up with the rest of the world after 60 years of independence.

Let’s start with Padang Terap in Kedah, since this is Mahdzir’s stronghold and his own constituency. Kedah is, after all, Mahathir’s own homeland. Or, if Mahdzir lacks confidence, we can also start with Pagoh, since this is Muhyiddin’s own stronghold.

After all, both Mahathir and Muhyiddin were both former key Umno leaders and held the portfolio of education minister. Surely Madhzir cannot erase this fact from history. If I may add: these two former education ministers were also responsible for the initial and gradual decline of our education system.

They should know better how to fix things that have gone wrong. This is probably one reason why, in his later years, Mahathir tried to revert the teaching of science and mathematics to English, realising that Malaysians are at a great disadvantage when they do not have a good command of the English language.

While we are drifting as a nation and our country’s reputation has been hit real hard due to the 1MDB scandal and the way we dealt with the missing MAS flight MH370, Singapore, as a nation, has moved so far ahead compared to Malaysia under 60 years of Umno rule. Its minority group is being well taken care of and Singapore recently saw the rise of a Malay woman as its president.

One could argue that this is nothing but another political gimmick by the Singapore government, but I hardly hear any issues about stateless children in Singapore. Every child is accorded the right to education.

Singapore may not have its own astronaut, but its performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) ranking was impressive. Singapore was top in a list of top five spots in the world, ahead of Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, while Malaysia ranked a dismal position of 52 out of 72 countries in the Pisa 2015 report. Why?

Pisa ranking is carried out triennially and produced by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to benchmark the performance of students worldwide. Surely, this would give us at least a good indication that there are weaknesses that need to be addressed. No?

After all, without admitting there are weaknesses in our education system, how can we improve?

Subsequently, when Mahdzir became education minister in 2016, Serdang MP Ong Kian Ming (photo) raised the question on why Malaysia had been excluded in its rankings for Mathematics, Reading and Science. As usual, there was no proper answer from Mahdzir.

On the contrary, the official reason for the non-inclusion is clearly stated on Page 340 of the Pisa report: “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 initially 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."

Consistently, as a nation, we were ranked 52 in both 2012 (65 countries) and 2015 (72 countries). This speaks volumes about our education system. Ask any family from Johor whose children are attending schools in Singapore, and I can bet you that they no longer have confidence in our education system.

Resignation or loss of votes?

I thought I was going to take a break from being a commentator on Malaysiakini, but Mahdzir’s latest statement has taken me by surprise. Such whitewashing should not have come from the mouth of an education minister.

Anyone with a right mind would agree with me that the whole event organised by the school in Putrajaya was done in blatant disregard of the good policies in place.

Coupled with what we saw of the antics of Sungai Besar Umno chief, Jamal, we fear that our education system will be producing more of such people in the years to come, especially when politics start creeping into our schools.

It is enough to see the scorn on Federal Territories Minister Tengku Adnan Mansor’s face, but for an education minister to claim that it was nothing wrong to host such an event on school grounds, it is simply obnoxious.

Mahdzir can decide now whether he should, on his own accord, resign as minister of education. Or we, as parents throughout the country, would have to just do what is right: cast a vote for change at our own voting station.

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STEPHEN NG is an ordinary citizen with an avid interest in following political developments in the country since 2008.- Mkini