4 things we can do to improve our children’s education

 

It’s easy to whinge about our under-performing education system, just as it’s easy to spout forth impractical solutions that fly against the face of reality.

Ignore the politicians. There are some good ones, some misguided ones and increasingly, many bigoted and corrupted ones who have found a winning formula in exploiting our democratic system with increasingly racist and bigoted world views.

Let’s talk about what we can do instead, because ultimately it’s our children who will bear the impact of our actions or inactions.

Role of parents

First – parents must focus on their children’s education. They must agonise about it constantly and not leave it in the hands of faceless bureaucrats or increasingly, politicised theocrats.

This sounds obvious, but for many this isn’t the case, many having to focus on just putting food on the table. Less forgivably, there are many who just leave it to the government to handle.

I was lucky to have had parents who believed only education could get us out of poverty, even if they themselves were uneducated or illiterate in the case of my mother. I’ve benefited from their vision while many of the people I grew up with remain where they are, mind and body stuck in the kampung.

Get involved

Parents must do their own research, even if it’s just observing the world around them or asking questions. They must take an active part in how schools are run – they must attend meetings of parent-teacher organisations or even have a role in them or on the school boards.

They must not accept the often unspoken belief they’re not “learned” enough to understand issues best left to their “betters”. Nobody has more right to do something about children’s future than the parents.

Parents must also be the primary guide of their children’s morals and faith, and not leave it to some stranger whether in schools or elsewhere. If they feel the children need additional help on this, by all means send them to specialised religious classes.

If parents really want their children to have a better life than them, they must do more than just hope somebody somewhere will find a great solution for the children’s future. This is Malaysia, not Finland.

Important qualities

Second – it takes more than just good grades to make it in career and life.

Grades are becoming less important as they alone are not a good indicator of a person’s qualities. They’re certainly not meaningless or irrelevant – they do reflect to a large degree our innate intelligence, passion and commitment.

But grades alone aren’t enough. Go for the best grades possible certainly, but remember other qualities are increasingly becoming more important.

What are these qualities?

The most important is resilience – the ability to withstand, endure and prevail over tough circumstances. It’s about having the psychological stamina to withstand the challenges of life.

I have a young relative who attended a well-known Chinese primary school that offers the Malaysian syllabus in the morning, and the Singaporean syllabus in the afternoon. The hard work required to succeed builds resilience from a young age, and generally makes them stronger than their cohorts elsewhere. That’s resilience.

Dealing with groups

Another quality is the ability to communicate and work well in a group. Almost any job, from marketing to engineering, requires a high level of teamwork and interactions with many others within or outside the organisation. And unfortunately, this isn’t taught much in schools.

Get your kids to socialise with a diverse group of people. Remember, attending a school with an enrolment predominantly of one community or gender will not be good preparation for the real world.

That’s why I chose not to have my son attend my old secondary boarding school, not so much because of the quality of education, but because it has a single-race single-gender student population that just doesn’t reflect the real world.

Hard and soft skills

Another quality is being good with the “hard” as well as the “soft’ skills. The new world requires being good with the hard skills of technologies and analytics, as well as the soft skills of being a good communicator, creative and persuasive.

Third – be multilingual. Knowledge is wealth, the kind for which society places no restriction on being greedy. Language can open up a whole new world that would otherwise have been closed to us.

I’ve always encouraged young couples to get their young children to learn a foreign language. It could be a major European language such as German or French, or a major Asian language such as Mandarin, Japanese, Korean or Arabic.

Free overseas education

Many countries offer subsidised or even free education, which can be useful should the children decide to study overseas. Don’t just focus on the English-speaking countries – they’ve become good at ripping overseas students off because we keep blindly flocking to them.

Germany, for example, offers tuition-free university studies provided you study in the German language. While we in the Anglophone countries hold the English-speaking universities very highly, we should also ask: how bad is it to study engineering in Germany or Japan?

The end result

A final advice is this – education is also meant to turn you into a decent human being. Being self-sufficient economically is of course an important part of this, but it’s not the only goal of education. You also need to understand and respect the people and the world around you, and have principles you’re willing to sacrifice for.

That may sound idealistic – but what’s wrong with setting our expectations high?

Remember, none of us will be able to have a big impact on education nationally – it’s just too complex and too politically-charged. But neither can we just leave things with politicians to make decisions they won’t be around to be answerable for later.

To bring about any change, we should make the change ourselves, starting with improving the quality of educating our most cherished “possession” – our children. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.