What is the point if we don't have the brains?
Tough, unruly boys' schools became sporting powerhouses and equally good scholar producing schools as well. Students which most teachers today would have long given up hope on, were taken on by these able teachers and turned into worthy citizens that we see today. Some are captains of industries, politicians, ministers and in other top notch positions all due to the basic fundamentals that was in our education system three decades ago.
Bring the clock forward to current time and what we see is a pathetic and pale comparison to what it was before. Children today can't even speak and write in proper grammatically correct English even after 11 years of schooling. Children today are being compartmentalised and groomed like little toy robots that are only geared into thinking about getting as many As as possible in the exams that they been programmed to sit for.
Gone are the critical thinking ability, the ability to question, the ability to reason and most important of all the ability to read and speak well at the age of 17 when they sit for their SPM public exam. Most of these kids are out in the real world hardly knowing how to write a simple official letter in either the national language or English. The task is gargantuan if it is in English as these kids are taught by teachers who do not speak the language themselves.
As the Parliamentarians like Tony Pua and Khairy Jamaluddin had put it, the system needs to be overhauled but is it best done by abolishing the exams? What then is the indicator that the chi! ld is pr ogressing from what he or she has been taught? The entire fault line has been the experiments that the various education ministers have been carrying out with the quality of teachers that are entering the profession. Most are only interested in a permanent monthly salary which will see them through till their retirement age and thereafter guarantee a pension till they expire.
Once they get the positions and are confirmed, they start the commercialisation of education by starting numerous tuition centres and nobody questions the fact as to whether these teachers actually have the time to teach at the school which they are posted to? Most of the time, the children are asked to do their own work whilst the teacher is missing! Perhaps busily conducting some revision course to 'paying' students at the air-conditioned centres.
The government seems to continuously fail to realise that it will be the loser at the end of the day as the cost of re-training unemployed youths and those who indulge in criminal delinquency will have to be borne by it. They in turn then pass the cost onto the us the 'rakyat' by taxing us in every way they can. Seeing this vicious cycle continue year after year, many parents have started putting their kids in private schools which cater for a more holistic method in teaching.
Some of these schools are teaching the Singaporean, Australian, Taiwanese, British, American, Canadian and Indian syllabuses to their students and many Malaysians who have lost hope in our system have begun to subscribe to this new trend. What respect will they have for their own nation when this seems to be the case today?
We had a great system many years ago, when the students were graded according to grades of 1-3. A first grader's aggregate was between 6-24 and a second grader's aggregate was between 25-33. Those who were 1st graders were considered to be very good students as one had to sit for a minimum of six subjects from three different groupings and have a credit in Bahasa Malaysia which wa! s compul sory for a 1st grade. Some with 6 strong credits of C4 could also be a 1st grader just like a person with 6 A1s.
The pressure to produce the As was not evident and the students of this era who are in their late 30s and 40s today have excelled in their chosen fields and have no problem when it comes to their command of languages be it Malay or English. But sadly today, we do not see the quality of the yesteryears anymore as the good teachers have all retired or passed on and so have the strict missionaries who have all left the country after their services were not needed anymore. Instead, we have a generation of students who have As on paper but are not worth interviewing as they are just unable to think out of the box.
Getting rid of exams may be the easy way out but are we ready with an alternative? Why can't we revert to our old system where we emphasised more on going to school and participating in schooling activities besides studying? The promotion of teachers should be based on merit and not on race and religion. More men should be encouraged to take up teaching which has now become a profession which is dominated by women. Men must come back to teaching as many good male teachers of yesteryears had moulded many good and capable students from those whom many would have given up on.
We must first stop the practice of allowing every education minister to experiment with the future of Malaysia's youth and strive to bring back the system which we once had which produced not only capable students, but equally capable sportsmen and women. If we need to get foreign experts to help us find a solution, then it must be done.
The British would be the best as we inherited our older system from them and their tertiary education is still the most sought after by Malaysians till to this date. We may have all the highest, tallest, widest and biggest structures and monuments but what is the use when we just do not have the brains to maintain them and progress further? !
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