Third World Educators for First World Education?

Much has been said about Malaysian education and mostly negative things. Since the abolishment of PPSMI in 2009, the Malaysian education seems to be going haywire. The students are becoming weaker in English and when some of them become teachers, they ended up becoming teachers with poor command of English too.

The teachers are always screaming for more money and no rest. Too many forms to fill-up, complicated procedures, too many meetings and courses and workshops, yet nothing good have come out of anything except more complaints and problems.

Less and less students choose to take up science stream while more and more students have moral breakdown issues. On top of that, we have more and more teachers who are mentally questionable. Despite all these, our SPM results keep recording good scores every year.

And so, we question: What is happening to Malaysian education?

1. The Oppositions (Read: Chinese from MCA and DAP) answered that it is the stupid UMNO Malay ruling that dragged our education quality down the drain. So the Chinese don’t want to have anything to do with national education and push for the government to recognize a separate education system for the Chinese.

In the meantime,..

2. The Malay teachers in Sekolah Kebangsaan answered that the students and teachers are being put on so much pressure because of so many examinations and tests. So they suggest that we must do away with examinations just like the first world country where teachers and students all ‘lepak’ - no stress.

And when the government heard the words ‘just like the first world country’, they got all excited and take it that this must be the right answer that is: to copy whatever the first world country is doing. With that, we woke up one day and heard that there will be no more examinations in school for our kids.

Speechless.

How do we evaluate their performance then? How do expose our kids to competition and how do we instill the spirit of striving to be the best?

Ah, the teachers will do the evaluation based on their observation and no, the kids need no competition as it will only effect their self-esteem should they not do so well in academic. The kids need not strive to be the best in anything because that would be stressful. Kids are supposed to play around and have fun.

I don’t know whether the government knows that in our schools today, only the teachers’ children get to be the prefect. A teacher’s daughter would be given the answers for the prefect qualification test by her own mother. A teacher’s son would get to represent the school for badminton even when he came out fourth in the school’s competition. PIBG kids will get to go on trips with PIBG money while other kids dream on.

If only the government invest in CCTV in all classrooms, we would be looking at teachers who are online on facebooks while they made the kids do their own work.

Our teachers are far from able to detect any special talent or potential among their students. All they know is either a kid is noisy or obedient, and whether a kid did well or badly in the exam. Now that there are no more exams, they won’t even know that, will they?

Teachers nowadays don’t even care to call up the parents should a student is absent for days. They don’t even care! Hell, some of the teachers don’t even bother that the children are waiting outside the school-gate alone, long after other kids have gone home.

Now, would these teachers know if a student has an exceptionally higher IQ than the rest? No way!..our teachers can’t even detect autism! In many cases they would just call an autistic kid ‘stupid’.

So much of a first world country education, eh?

It looks like the government has been trying to solve all problems of the country by simply imitating the first world country. It is like a poor man striving to be rich by merely imitating the life of a rich man. In the end, the poor will only become poorer, definitely.

What the poor man needs to do to be rich is to learn from the rich man on how did he become rich not how to live like a rich man. The poor man needs to look back into the time when the rich man was not rich yet and imitate what he did then, not now.

In Malaysia’s case, we should look at the first world country during the days when it was not yet a first world country. We should imitate Japan when it was struggling to get out of Hiroshima ashes. We should look back and imitate and do what they do in those times. We must not copy what they do now because we have yet to get where they are.

We can never reach the same destination running on our feet when they are moving on jet-plane. We may run and try to catch up but we will only fall and eventually die of exhaustion.

Bottomline, we need to have teachers with first world mentality to be able to handle the first world education system.