(W)EEDING, (W)ITING AND A(W)ITHMATIC?

I WENT to primary school imbued with the notion that kids sought an education designed to teach them the 3Ws – weeding, witing and awithmatic (sic). It only dawned on me that Ms Koh – bless her soul – who first introduced me to this universal pedagogic concept in primary school during the heyday of the Beatles had some kind of speech condition.

Apparently, she had a tough time getting her tongue round the pesky consonant R, calling it out as a vowelly W, when I jumped up to the next class the next year.

That now; inconsequential impediment however certainly did not scar me for life as it did not stand in my way of acquiring knowledge thrust from the bounds of school life.

So looking back at my deprivation all those years ago, I must express admiration for the determination displayed by our cohort of eager primary pupils our school system currently admits.

I also hold snotty nosed students our secondary school system churns out a la production line in the highest esteem. I place them in high regard. School boys and school girls out there – I salute you. Why? The answer lies in the fate of guinea pigs, that’s why!

The tiresome lengths to which adults who profess to plan, plot and administer our education system go at hair-pulling is mind-boggling. It appears the way forward is still in blue print, having been studied at great cost, hatched with undue haste and launched, invariably; with great hullabaloo amid mindless fanfare.

What is it that you face when you come to school unfailingly daily?

Let’s see, firstly, you are greeted by the anonymously bland, functional three-story rectangular block that appears to have jumped out of the Jabatan Kerja Raya (Public Works Department or PWD/JKR) architectural manual.

To my mind, no building template can be so uniformly unimaginative than this square stump rising up from the ground. One does not exactly have to be an adherent of Renzo Piano or Norman Foster or Hijaz Kasturi for that matter; to appreciate that pleasing aesthetics lends itself to the incubation and promotion of great achievements.

Just look at the design of all the private Chinese schools in even the most rural of small towns. You get a feeling that the principal welcomes you with open arms, the teachers want to impart knowledge and the PTA will back your efforts at acquiring not just knowledge but a wholesome education.

Or pay a visit to any number of the mushrooming private schools, you know the one not too far from Beranang.

Proper padangs – not some irregular diamond-shaped, mimosa-infested, bumpy barren patch that passes for the school playing field – and elegantly manicured lawns beckons. Olympic-sized swimming pools complete with compulsory lessons; Yamaha upright (at the very least), drama rooms – extra curricular syllabi that enhances the pursuit of a well-rounded individual.

Once you get pass the front gates, hello kelas (sic) - 2 Bijak, 3 Budiman, 4 Gagah or 5 Bistari. The crammed conditions – more often more than 40 packed to the gills; hardly conducive at producing anyone who is neither bijak nor budiman, far from gagah, much less bistari!

Then there is the syllabus itself. Too much time spent on some subjects with no weight given to the learning the English Language.

Show me some Form 6 school leaver with the ability to string a full BI sentence and I’d show you what I regard a jarring statistical outlier. (I detected the slide the moment school children started to refer to English Language as BI – Bahasa Inggeris!)

The fact that the name of the subject itself was liberally mutilated simply shows how little regard there is for the language. Try this test – tell a 5th former to head for the Palace of the Golden Horses Hotel and Resort and ask that the destination is repeated. Chances are the order with which the name of the venue is repeated back to you will see you tearing your hair in exasperation.

You see, the name of the hotel itself is not unlike talking in a full English sentence, something, sadly, our schools failed to deliver.

So it was no surprise when rumblings were heard within a section of the teaching profession at the grand plan to replace examinations with an alternative way of continuous assessment.

The system may be working for some advanced countries – but lest we forget, those countries are really far, far advanced.

Talk about internet speeds, talk about class sizes, talk about....anything under the sun! They are leaps and bounds ahead of us in many, many respects.

So what is the panacea for our education ills?

Simple. Throw books at the kids – plenty of books; and not those soppy love stories churned out by local publishers all cashing in on formulaic soppy tales of amorous escapades.

Where are the Enid Blytons – never mind that she harboured right wing views; it did not harm the legions of Ahmad, Ah Chong or Muthu who grew up on the nocturnal adventures of the infamous Secret Seven or the sleuthing exploits of the Famous Five.

Get them to graduate to Readers Digest – though one really has to look for back copies from the 1970s where the venerable institution did not look like some gaudy mailorder catalogue – and on to Science or Living History publications – and National Geographic.

Listen to good radio now easily accessed on the internet. In the cranky old days of Short Wave transmission, one could only tune in to the BBC for the weekend dose of English League football games between the hours of 8pm to midnight on Saturday evenings.

So really, when I hear of the travails of our teachers, with this or that initiative foisted upon their overburdened shoulders, I can only ask of the policy makers; stop gambling on the future of the poor kids.

The wheel has been invented; all you need are the 3Rs. Its worked before, will work now, will work forever!