Malaysia’s recipe for disaster
Doesn’t it concern anyone that straight “A” SPM students can hardly speak English, fail their university Matriculation and do poorly at international-standard exams such as GCE?
By Aizuddin Danian
This has got to be the most sombre and depressing article i’ve read in many moons. Why? Because its true. All of it.
Fast forward to the present and it would be very hard for any graduate to follow my act without substantial help from their parents. No, I wasn’t from the privileged class and I didn’t get a leg-up from my parents, save for the education they gave me. Present day graduates start their working life at RM1800 to RM2000 a month, not a lot of difference from 25 years ago but prices of everything have tripled and quadrupled. A hawker meal now cost RM5 (drinks extra), prices of cars and houses have grossly outpaced income and there are new expenses like toll, hand phones, Astro and internet. Our ringgit has depreciated against foreign currencies making consumer goods and overseas travel more expensive. To put it simply, real income has declined.
If its this bad for us of this generation now, imagine how bad it’ll be for the next. Unless we do something about it.
Blaming this on BN’s corruption is convenient (while arguably also being true). I’m not yet convinced, as some others are, that simply voting in an alternative Government in GE13 will make that much of a difference. Of course, i’m ready to be proved wrong on that point, but my gut tells me that there is something systemically wrong with Malaysia for us to have gone down this path. Something that can’t be voted away; a devil in different clothes is still the devil.
Could it be policy errors, has Malaysia focused on the wrong things over the years? The reason why Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea has taken such awesome strides in the last 2 decades could be a result of their economic policies — they focused on financial services (Singapore) and high-technology industrialization (Taiwan and South Korea). While we were stuck with crops and agriculture and tin. We did well when the world needed those things in abundance (circa 1960s-70s-early 80s), but when the rest of the world moved on, did we follow?
Are we making the same mistakes now with our reliance on oil and gas to fuel (pun intended) our economy? I don’t know how much longer that source of income will last, but it can’t be forever, probably not even through my lifetime. What do we do when that runs out too?
Have our forays into high-tech like the MSC or high-industrialization like the automobile industry been in vain? In principle, probably not. After all, it worked elsewhere, why wouldn’t it work in Malaysia? Good ideas are good ideas but its also true that no good idea survives when starved of a solid supporting framework. And, to me, that’s what we’ve missed the boat on.
How good is our human capital? The first thing a manager is taught is that your people are your company’s life. You are only as good as your worst employee. The same must be true of a country. We are only as good as our worst citizen. Sadly, they’ve been just too many of those.
It’s not their fault, not entirely anyways. This is where government comes in, the investment in the human capital of a nation is probably the highest priority of any developing nation, and that’s been our greatest failure. Singapore did it. Taiwan, Korea, and even China today is doing it.
Development of human capital means education. It means taking the roots of the country, our children, and giving them mental fortitude and strength to carry the nation on their shoulders. We didn’t do any of this. The school system, fragmented by the need to have national schools, non-national schools, chinese schools, madrasahs (islamic schools), and everything in between is a mess of epic proportions. By trying to cater to everyone, we end up helping no one.
The syllabus is poor (you can’t expect ill-qualified teachers to teach something beyond their own capacity to understand), the curriculum subject to political whims (English should have been made the language of at least half the subjects in schools) and the bar constantly being shifted in order to ensure a good Ministry of Education report card (doesn’t it concern anyone that straight “A” SPM students can hardly speak English, fail their university Matriculation and do poorly at international-standard exams such as GCE?).
