Malaysia’s value-less education
Rip Van Winkle, The Malaysian Insider
Has there ever been doubt that the income/wellbeing gap between stronger and weaker students will widen over time if problems related to this fissure are not addressed sooner rather than later?
For at least the last two decades now, a mountain of evidence from around the world, and not just in Malaysia, has emerged to prove the case. Yet education authorities led by their ministries have dithered, sat on their hands, and practically done nothing about dealing with this ultimately political and economic problem.
The American, British, certainly the Scandinavian and German governments, and a few in Asia, have woken to the centrality of education of its people, especially its young, who they understand perfectly well anchor their countries’ future wellbeing.
To that end they have taken concrete steps to rectify longstanding problems of inequity in access to better education and educational resources.
But not Malaysia.
The ones who normally fall between the cracks of an increasing decrepit education system from primary through to secondary and university education are those from working to lower-working class families, and most especially those families who either eke out a living every day or who are structurally unemployed. And there are many Malays among them.
One of the biggest problems that the New Economic Policy (1970) has singularly failed to address, despite its lofty promises and grand ideals, is the worsening nature of poverty in “modern” Malaysia. For all of its superhighways, longest bridges and tallest buildings, poverty (in relative and structural terms) has been a long-sustained industry.
Simultaneously the “government”, ruled by Umno, has done its darnest to ruin education in every way imaginable. Education is basket case to Malaysia as the economy is to North Korea, by any index.
Malaysia’s finance minister and prime minister wears the same mask but, truth be told, he is enormously clueless and incompetent in running the country and the economy. Likewise, the country’s education minister, who, frankly, knows much less than peanuts about education, per se, in the modern and increasingly competitive world. And still Malaysia’s ruling politicians think Malaysia can, and does, exist in a global vacuum.
The sooner these politicians understand just how they have ruined Malaysia over the decades, and rid themselves of their positions of power (i.e., resign), and the sooner they are replaced by intelligent, well-educated and experienced people in their fields, the better off the country might be, in relative terms.
I use “might” instead of “will” because even intelligent, well-educated and experienced people can, and do, create heightened problems, as history shows, and not just in Malaysia but also in the West.
The Asian financial crisis (1997-98) and the global financial crisis (2007-08) are cases in point, where avarice and arrogance congealed with utterly corrupt motives to produce intractable trouble bordering on international and national catastrophe.
This is where education in Malaysia finds itself in 2014 – facing imminent disaster, verging on implosion.
There was a time in the 1960s and early 70s when the one thing that Malaysia guaranteed was a credible level of education. By mid-1970, when Dr Mahathir Mohamad was installed as education minister, problems in education each year turned into politico-ideological calamity founded on state-sponsored racism.
Instead of educating Malaysia’s youth, the latter were being indoctrinated with ideas of separation by race and religion and of rights and entitlement. So much so, today, the only thing Malaysia is prepared to guarantee is ongoing scathing racism and religious bigotry, and of paralytic corruption and compulsive standards for spinning lies.
Rivalrous religion, rather than humanity, civility and sincerity, has become the lowest common denominator in Malaysia. This is not only regressive but also, to put it plainly, stupid.
That said, though, academic achievement is not the only way out of the socioeconomic quagmire for past, present and future students. It is not the be-all and end-all of education and employment.
Karl Marx was right when he argued that the capital-owning class would always want a large pool of unemployed and lowly educated people in a country so they can exploit them to the hilt whilst manipulating to lower their wage.
