Formidable hurdles in KL’s education reform

By Salim Osman, The Straits Times

Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced last month that a committee had been set up to study the country’s education system.

Its objective is to recommend ways to overhaul the 50-year-old system. Tan Sri Muhyiddin, who is also Education Minister, was candid when he explained the reason for the revamp: “Our education policy is not on a par with others.”

That initial announcement was met with much enthusiasm in Malaysia, especially from parents. Even those critical of the system have thrown their support behind the government initiative.

This is a good start, showing support for reform. That the government-led initiative can garner support from different sectors of society suggests that on this issue, at least, people take the government’s plan seriously and have high hopes for its success.

The committee will have to work hard not to dissipate that goodwill, but to harness it to seek solutions.

The reforms are also well-timed, as they seek to align education policy with the economic agenda of Prime Minister Najib Razak to bring the country to the next level of development, with high growth and high income by 2020.

Malaysia’s education system needs to produce workers who are competitive and skilled technically, and who are proficient in English. Without this essential human capital, no true economic transformation can take place.

The government committee will present a report later this year. It faces a daunting challenge.

The current education system has been shaped by the Razak Report of 1956. Malay is the medium of instruction in all public schools at primary and secondary levels and at higher institutions of learning. At university level, English is widely used, even though in theory Malay, as the national language, is the only medium of instruction for all subjects.

As a political concession to non-Malays, the government allows vernacular schools to exist at primary level, where Chinese or Tamil are the languages for instruction. Secondary-level education in Chinese is only available at independent Chinese schools.

There are no English-medium schools as all of them were converted to the Malay stream from 1970, in line with the language and education policy.

As part of the affirmative actions under the New Economic Policy of 1971, a number of Malay-only programmes and institutions have been created, such as Mara Junior Science colleges, to raise the number of Malay students studying science. There is also an ethnic quota for admission into local tertiary institutions.

Critics say that pro-Malay programmes and policies have deprived Chinese students of an equal opportunity to study in public tertiary institutions, forcing them to enrol in large numbers in private colleges and universities.

Ironically, these pro-Malay programmes have forced Chinese students to become trilingual in Chinese, Malay and English, giving them an edge over Malay students who tend to be monolingual.

Years of emphasis on Malay as the medium of instruction have taken a toll on English proficiency. Employers have grumbled that graduates of public universities – mostly Malays – have such a poor command of the language that they are not employable for many jobs.

The government re-introduced English as the medium for science and mathematics in 2003, but faced strong opposition from Malay nationalists and Chinese educationists. While Malays argued the move would dilute the national language, Chinese educationists felt it would undermine Chinese as a medium of instruction in Chinese schools.

In 2009, the government announced that the scheme would be scrapped and that the subjects would be taught in Malay once again from next year. The main reason given by the government was that over 67 per cent of the teachers were not competent enough to teach in English, and that more than 73 per cent of the students were not able to cope with the subjects taught in English.

But this has not stopped Malay-led groups like Parent Action Group for Education (Page) to continue pressing for the return of English in the teaching of science and mathematics. Others, keenly aware of the benefits of an English education, are calling for the revival of English-medium schools to exist side by side with national and vernacular schools.

Getting the language policy in schools right is crucial for Malaysia’s future.

Another big issue is whether the education system facilitates ethnic integration. Critics say that instead of integrating students of all races, the school system has polarised the population.

Ethnic integration is difficult to forge in schools as Malay children attend the Malay-medium national primary schools, staffed almost entirely by Malay teachers. Chinese and Indian parents tend to enrol their children in Chinese and Tamil schools respectively, considering these to be of better quality than Malay-language government schools. Attempts at integrating students of all races through “integrated schools”, “vision schools” and “cluster schools” have failed.

At the tertiary level, Malays dominate public universities because of the ethnic quota policy that gives 55 per cent of places to Malays, 30 per cent to Chinese and 10 per cent to Indians. Many non-Malays who do well enough to pursue a tertiary education end up in private universities.

A rising tide of Islamic fervour has also resulted in government schools becoming more “Islamic” to compete with Islamic schools for Malay students. This, however, has resulted in non-Malay children shunning government schools for vernacular ones.

It will not be easy for the government to institute reforms. Education in Malaysia concerns not only the economy and the future of a generation. It is also inextricably bound up with race, and ultimately with politics.

The committee may recommend reforms to the existing system. But it will require tremendous political will and difficult negotiation and consultation with relevant stakeholders to carry it out. This will be extremely difficult. And yet it will be necessary, for Malaysia’s future.