BY: CHRISTOPHER FERNANDEZ
Just two years ago, in the year 2024, when the PISA results were announced, Malaysian prime minister Anwar Ibrahim was bold and honest in confessing Malaysian students were the worst performing in Asean, especially in Science and Mathematics.
While Anwar must be accorded respect for his honest disclosure, since then, the education ministry has not factored what went wrong, and this is why many stakeholders and educationists believe the recently-unveiled National Education Blueprint is set to fail.
Positive and challenging suggestions were conveyed by stakeholders and educationists who have virtually spent a lifetime in Malaysian education, but their input were waved aside by deep state operatives in the education ministry who formulated the blueprint.
The National Education Blueprint, unless aborted, is set to run its course from this year 2026 to 2035 and worried and concerned observers reckon it would produce students who are lacking in depth and be unable to compete globally.
Just blame it on politics in education
Malaysia’s education ministry, like Anwar Ibrahim, must come clean. They must not engage in politicising the education sector and stop being the sycophants who flatter higher powers by destroying the future of innocent Malaysian school children.
Proposing dangerous ideas like studying revised history and other vague syllabi is set to push students back into the Dark Ages and promote the ideals of foggy educationists who dictate terms as deep state operatives.
Malaysian students must learn to engage in critical thinking and not be drawn backwards into studying subjects and courses of study that do not prepare them for the real world which is moving towards full globalization.
By subjecting students to ways of teaching that have long been made redundant, and arm-twisting them to accept virtually forcibly the diet of study of education ministry officials, hoping to promote their political beliefs, the blueprint is set to head nowhere.
Is it really that difficult to conform?
In countries around the world that have a very high standard of education for students, including Asean, there is conformity to egalitarian values and not to race and religion or parochial thinking.
The classroom must be a place that is completely irreligious. When teaching a new class of students, I tell them to place their race, religion and personal beliefs outside my classroom and to follow my teaching in English
This, after four and a half decades of teaching around Asia, is my time-tested and tried belief and the way to move forward in educating young minds to prepare them for a promising future and the continuity of life.
In this aspect, teachers should be trained and be prepared not to promote their personal beliefs and ideals but to adopt a policy of only promoting in its fullest depth the subjects which they are teaching students.
Vital for teachers to promote professionalism
Several years ago, the World Bank, in its Education Report, made a damning verdict that they found more than 70 per cent of Malaysian school teachers not fit to be in the classroom because they lack professional qualities.
Other educationists who are independent observers from around the region and internationally have voiced the same sentiments which have fallen on the deaf ears of education ministry officials indicating they are steeped in obstinacy.
The defiance of the education minister and the ministry officials is bewildering to say the least and completely appalling to right thinking Malaysians of all races and religions which is why education in Malaysia is in a disarray.
This leaves students and their parents with little choice but to find the money to opt for non-government school teaching like private and international schools, vernacular schools and home schooling as an alternative.
Malaysian education with the new blueprint is set to nosedive
Actually, there is no need to go that far. What a right thinking and educated individual needs to do is visit Malaysian government schools, sit in a class, and observe what goes on in these schools supposedly giving children “an education.”
They are bound to come away and be in agreement that the rot set in long ago, ever since the focus shifted from mission schools to government-run schools, and has annually become bad to worse.
This certainly means, by the tinkering in education and the lowering of standards by deep state operatives at the behest of politicians, there is no way you can expect anything much from most students leaving Malaysian schools for further study or work.
Given this worrying scenario, parents must learn to figure for themselves how they wish to educate their children, and they must be seriously aware of prevailing realities in education, where the education ministry panders to the hopeless politics of the day.
**Christopher Fernandez can be found offering counsel now on Superprof Malaysia and has been teaching and writing throughout Asia since 1984
-THE MALAYSIA VOICE
(The views expressed on this opinion is of the writer and not the publisher)
