Saving Malaysian education: 3 unacceptable ideas
Malaysia needs teachers who can passionately tell the story of Chin Peng without making it sound like he was the devil incarnate and Umno was God’s pet angel. These teachers would then easily encourage students to care more about their country’s underprivileged children than about their canteen’s undercooked chicken.
Alwyn Lau, TMI
Why “unacceptable”? Because the acceptable – tied as it is to the “accepted’ – is boring. Just like education as a whole and Malaysian education especially. The following ideas will never happen. We simply won’t allow it and they’re quite impossible. Or are they?
Teach teachers drama
Malaysia needs Al Pacino. Or, given the hole in our national treasury, perhaps we should fly in Shahrukh Khan instead. Whoever it is, we need drama in our schools.
Our classrooms are starving for enthusiasm, and I’m not only referring to that category of the undead called “students”. Our educators also look less happy and passionate (and far less motivated) than the Jerusalem wall-climbers in World War Z.
Every Malaysian who wishes to teach, hence, should be a qualified “dramatist” as well. “Sandiwara” must be saved from our politics to save our education.
We need to train our teachers to talk, move, gesticulate and emote like their brains actually had chemicals in them. This is to say that teachers must learn how to smile, cry or fume when facilitating their subject – especially if they don’t feel like smiling, crying or fuming.
Right now in the average Malaysian classroom, the lecturer usually looks as if he’s bored, constipated or worried sick about that MQA form he has to fill up – and this just won’t do.
Instead we need lecturers who behave like the lead dancer in Swan Lake and teach or perform like the universe is watching. These are people whose students will leave a session on “Global Warming” with their hearts on fire and ready to throw (clean) paint bombs at polluting factories.
We need teachers like that dude who stood inside a waterfall with pebbles in his mouth, practicing how to speak well. These folks could put the fear of bad speech into students the way Jonathan Edwards putting the fear of God and hell in the hearts of his church members.
We want Maths lecturers who can transport their listeners back to ancient Greece and re-live the wonders of discovering the numerical system.
Believe it or not, such imaginative transferences require a lot more than academic knowledge and a textbook. It takes heart.
Malaysia needs teachers who can passionately tell the story of Chin Peng without making it sound like he was the devil incarnate and Umno was God’s pet angel. These teachers would then easily encourage students to care more about their country’s underprivileged children than about their canteen’s undercooked chicken.
Maybe “drama” isn’t the best word here. We could also use “art”, “performance”, “courage”, “life” – you get the picture. But I don’t think the MOE (Ministry of Education) does?
Flip teachers’ salaries
Here’s a sad fact. The teachers responsible for moulding the minds of excited little children are paid much lower than the big-shots with Pizza Hut Delivery titles who “educate” our bored young adults by droning on and on in over-sized lecture halls.
The logic is amazing: “You are paid so low because the fees for educating children are much lower”. This is the same logic governing why helping drug addicts to get back on their feet will earn you much less than if you seek to persuade already-rich folks they should make even more.
