Government and its premature education policies -- Wan Mohd Salman

Besides keeping on actively being critical of the Najib’s administration, Tun Dr. Mahathir is seen not to have yet lose his sense of humor when he recently mentioned that he’d want to be the Prime Minister again if he has a chance. One of things he’d want to do is to bring back the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI).

PPSMI is one of many things he brought to the nation during his tenure as the PM back then. Introducing things like that and others such as Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and the new administration territory, Putrajaya had led him being remembered as the Malaysia’s Father of Modernization.

In summary, his period of administration was mostly about modernizing Malaysia with mega infrastructures, mega projects, investments and bringing forward education to the “next level”, hence PPSMI.

It was intended that PPSMI will globalize the students early in schools by learning Science and Maths in English as so to complement the need to empower the fields in the current lingua franca.

But things didn’t really turn out nice as it should.

It was already a problem in rural areas where opportunities to get extra materials and classes to reinforce learning is rather less than in urban areas. This is an important factor of the education gap happening now.

To worsen the situation, the language education, particularly English, in rural areas is also a major disadvantage to the. It is an open secret that in schools with around 90 per cent of Malays and Bumiputera, even in secondary schools, English teachers speaking Malay more than English during lessons.

Is this supposed to help them having more chances to communicate the language, let alone enhancing their skills? As far as we’re concerned, this may only help the kids to pass standardized exams rather than learning the language.

At the end of the day, they essentially don’t learn anything, having problems in understanding the basics of Maths and Sciences, in English.

If this is just to widen the gap of enhancing the students’ skills in Maths and Sciences, what good is brought about here?

Rather, this is a problematic, “premature” education policy brought forth by Tun.

After Tun M. retire, PPSMI was abolished and Science and Maths are now back being taught in Malay. A problem may have got solved. But yet, another one arises.

In 2014, Ministry of Education (MOE) introduced a more thorough implementation of School-based Assessments (PBS); formerly implemented to mostly oral tests for language subjects.

It is actually good that we have finally found a way out of extremely exam-oriented system and make a step forward. But yet, the “preconditions” were not yet satisfied beforehand.

Generally, a classroom with a teacher usually holds some 40 students. This would mean that the teachers would be burdened with workloads of updating the current students’ achievements in the system, adding another burden beside the teaching bit.

Different from being a university lecturer, a school teacher, when he teaches, must get to know their students one-by-one and constantly give them personal touches in order to do so. Now that the workloads are burdening them more, they have less chance to actually teach and nurture the kids.

In addition to that, it is reported that there are some 29.7% of schools in Malaysia being categorized as schools with very little number of students. Ninety per cent of these schools are very poorly-funded; some of them even reside in other schools’ facilities and buildings. These schools, due to having very little students, practice multi-grade teaching. As far as we can see from the environment of these schools, this is not a plausible condition to implement that kind of system.

Well, if those aren’t the worse, the PBS management system (SPPBS) would just complement the compilation of the “worsts” of PBS. With the system keeps hanging and lagging, it’d make just a perfect match with the tons of workloads the teachers have to face.

Not just the managements system worsening it; even the internet speed won’t argue with the implementation of the online system. According ASEAN’s report on internet speed index of the member nations, Malaysia’s average internet speed is only around 5.5 Mbps, far from the global average of 17.7 Mbps, let alone our neighbour’s, Singapore’s 61 Mbps. Even Vietnam beat us!

With the implementation of PBS, both teachers and students are expected to make use of ICT. But from the research done in a rural school by a team from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), almost 80% of the students in that secondary school don’t have a computer at their home with more than 50% of them not being competent enough to utilize them. In fact, 70 per cent of them only get to use computer for just around an hour a day.

Beside that, a good 42.9 per cent don’t know how to use Microsoft Words and 60 per cent of them are reportedly don’t really know how to use e-mail.

PBS is after all just another “premature” policy brought forth by the MOE.

So if Tun M of anyone from the current BN really want to be PM, would you consider making the policy that would better meet the current conditions? Because if not, what is the real use of education policies if they only benefit certain group of people?