One school not ‘racist’, just ‘unintelligent’
Wenger Khairy today expressed his contempt at the latest controversy to surround the blogging world when he dismissed the 1 School concept as being 'unintelligent.'
Meeting reporters after chairing the "Lets Kick Stupidity Out of Malaysia" forum, he pulled no punches when asked to comment about the 1 School concept, a concept that had been originated by a group of bloggers who call themselves "DN Knights". He said "From the reports I received these bloggers want to force a single school system with the provision that arrangements be made to teach Mandarin and Tamil to those who require it. Basically they have tried to equate a whole long list of isolated effects, ranging from the controversy where one person made fun of the Negaraku to people blogging in Chinese and Tamil, to build a general notion that non-Malays in the country are not patriotic and would become more patriotic if they were to attend to a single national type school system."
"Right now people have options. Malay parents can send their children to Malay schools, Chinese schools or Tamil schools. We see that there is a growing trend of Malay parents sending their children to Chinese schools. Some Ministers even send their children to international schools. Why is that? Will those children end up being the traitors as what these bloggers try to make out?"
Its all about Options
"Options are what people want. I understand that a blogger going by the name of satD who is supposed to be advising the Indonesian Government in their financial sector is behind also this. His blog is titled Pure Shite. So I guess we must now teach our children to be more rude and vulgar as this will make them more patriotic."
"Maybe you should ask him why options are so important. Ask him why people are willing to pay a bit more for the right but not the obligation to pursue one course of action over another. This 1 School system they are trying to push takes away the options people have now."
Wenger then elaborated further. "I'll tell you why some Malay parents send their children to Chinese schools – its because its run very efficiently. There is a strong board of directors for the schools, the teachers and principals are motivated, the standards are high, and generally the students are motivated to study. If there was no comparitive advantage over national type schools, Malay parents would not send their children there. None of this was mentioned in their long letter to the Deputy Prime Minister."
"I also think its very unwise for bloggers to think themselves smarter than they really are. We become a laughing stock if bloggers hiding behind the luxury of their computer are successful in forcing national policy. And this on something so important as a national policy on education – this issue has been cropping up again and again. Rather than focus on trying to force people to forgo their option, these so called patriots should ask the Minister why is that the standard of Malaysian pupils in Science and Mathematics has been going steadily down. This has been evidenced by the Trends In International Mathematics and Science Survey (TIMSS), an international study that compared the performance of our students with those from other countries like Singapore, United States, UAE, Australia. It seems even the Arab students are doing better than the Malaysians, so in future, they won't need our expertise for anything, I think on the other hand if we continue to deteriorate, we probably will have to get Vietnamese or Bangladeshi expertise to build our next mega project."
READ MORE HERE: http://wengerkhairy.blogspot.com/
