For years, many people have voiced out and debated on the deteriorating quality of Malaysian education, but nothing much seems to have changed. Every time an examination result is announced, the media is full with those straight A’s stories.
With the ‘A-Syndrome’, our sons and daughters struggle with their homework, extra-classes and tuitions, at the expense of their childhood enjoyment. Some survive and succeed. Some fail and give up, drop out from school and join the bands of kaki lepak, mat rempit and drug users as they lose interest and hope in education. Some even commit suicide when the pressure from their parents and schools is too much to handle.
What happen to those who manage to go through the hardship and graduate from the universities? The common complaint among them is that it is very difficult to get a decent job despite having good paper qualification and technical knowledge. Second Finance Minister Datuk Seri Ahmad Husni Hanadzlah acknowledged not long ago that our graduate unemployment rate is one of the highest at 4%, and there seems to be a “mismatch between our industry’s needs and the output from the local universities”.
This comes as no surprise. I am not an education expert, but being in Human Resources for more than 18 years, I have interviewed many fresh graduates of all races. It is very sad that a majority of the local graduates glaringly lack the soft skills and cannot even express themselves, let alone giving opinions and convincing arguments when asked.
It is no secret that most multinationals companies prefer candidates from foreign universities. The reason is obvious- those graduates are perceived to have higher confidence level and better interpersonal skills which are very much needed in a matrix organisation.
We need to change the way we do things in school. Children must be trained to speak out their minds freely at as many opportunities as possible, exposing them to reasoning and communication skills and developing their self-confidence.
For example, portfolio assignments should focus on topics where the students need to give their own inputs rather than being just a search-copy-paste-print-and-bind project. They could even be asked to present their portfolios in front of the classroom where the teacher and other students listen, ask questions and give their opinions or critics.
Even a simple school trip could be organised in such a way to improve the students’ observation and analytical skills, and followed-up by discussions on what they learn from the trip, so that the trip is worthwhile and not just a meaningless sight-seeing activity.
Quality education at primary and secondary levels should focus on comprehensive development of the children during their fragile formative period, where academic expectations are balanced with games and informality as opposed to the present rigid system which suppresses self-reliance and motivation. We need a school with invigorating, stimulating and inspiring classroom environments, where the pupils will come to know themselves and love the process of learning itself. It is also important for the policy makers to ensure that the objectives of the curriculum and the activities are not lost in the implementations.
Other countries do have examinations like us, but in the UK for example, the students are not evaluated on how many A’s they have got, but mainly on how they think and progress. Tests and assessments are used mostly to diagnose needs and to target instructional resources where they can help the most, rather than to sort and screen. Most exam questions do not ask for memorised facts- they ask for ‘how’ and ‘why’ and the justification for the answers. And a big percentage of the grade comes from projects, not just the exams.
Their students have a longer recess where they can enjoy playing games rather than just rushing to queue up to buy food. On top of that, they have a short break after each period where they can interact and socialise and learn about teamwork under the teacher’s supervision.
Parents are called to meet the subject teachers every 2-3 months to discuss the students’ progress and identify improvement needs, whereas in Malaysia, parents meet only the class teachers and only after the exam results are out. They seem to have a school environment where the students love learning and have enough time to enjoy their childhood.
I was told that in Japan, Australia and some other developed countries, the pupils do not have homework because exercises are done in school during the last 20 minutes of the period after the teacher finishes the lesson. They learn better that way because the lesson taught is still fresh in their mind and the teacher is still around to explain, thus making tuition classes almost unheard of. Look at the amount of homework our kids have to do everyday besides attending tuition classes!
Recent writings on education seem to point to Finland as having maybe the best education system in the world. Perhaps Malaysia can send a team to benchmark their system and practices.
But then, we probably don’t even have to look very far to see the differences.
A friend of mine related this story recently. He managed to take his son out of a public school and got him into an international school in KL. His son came home on his first day of the new school with a huge worry- “They want me to give an opinion Pa. This is hard. I don’t have any opinion.”
His son was a straight A’s student prior to that.
We desperately need a metamorphosis of the education system to create a school environment that is fun and motivating, which promotes creativity, initiative, individuality and inquisitiveness instead of the current one which rely on rote learning, fact-regurgitation and conformity in order to pass exams.
Unfortunately, the actions taken so far to improve the quality of our education are akin to rearranging the deck chairs on Titanic. We must thoroughly re-engineer our education ship to take us to the right destination in the sea of challenges; we don’t need a sophisticated ship that takes us to the wrong port.
I hope the current discussions on our education system will finally put us back on the right track.
It is absolutely insane to do the same things over and over again and expect different outcomes. And we should stop counting the A’s when what emerges from the cocoon is just a faster caterpillar, not a butterfly.
Excellent!
ReplyDelete