EDUCATION IN MALAYSIA

Malaysia Public Policy Competition 2011

2011-08-08T12:28:00.003+08:00

A friend still in university, with Kian Ming's advice, has initiated a public policy competition for Malaysian youth. This is the sort of initiative and independence which more of our students should have. Registration has closed, and now almost 50 teams from a variety of schools and universities are competing for 16 spots in the final, where public policymakers will judge their ideas. The final round, to be held at UCSI University, looks like it will be exciting, even if you aren't participating -- how often do you get to hear 16 teams of Malaysian youth putting their policy suggestions out there for actual policymakers to listen to and critique?

The final will be held on Sunday 4 September, 2 to 5:30PM at the UCSI University North Wing, Kuala Lumpur Campus, in Cheras. The judges include the Chief Commissioner of the MACC, and the Speaker of the Selangor State Legislative Assembly. For more details and to guarantee a seat at the final, visit: http://malaysiapublicpolicycompetition.blogspot.com/p/audience-registration.html

For more general information about the competition, including a list of teams, see http://www.malaysiapublicpolicycompetition.blogspot.com/

What's After SPM? A whole world awaits

2011-07-23T12:19:00.003+08:00

Like most young people, I'm still not sure what I want to do with my life. Most people I think have an inkling of their personality and their interests, but not much of an idea of how to translate this into a vocation, career, or ideally, a calling. This is what makes the book What's After SPM?: 101 Stories, 101 Young Malaysians (edited by Roshan Thiran) so compelling. When I first got the book, I left it on my bedside table when I turned in for the night; my father picked it up, and the next day itself, he bought a few copies for my siblings and cousin. That tells you something about how important this book is, and what kind of niche it fills.

Before I continue, in the interest of full disclosure, I received a copy of this book free of charge in return for agreeing to review it. I was not given any other compensation or instructions. I also happen to know a few of those 101 Malaysians who wrote for the book -- one of whom is my co-blogger here, Kian Ming.

The title of the book is actually a little misleading; some of those who write in it, such as Kian Ming, never sat for SPM. Rather, the point of the book is to give readers a sense of what opportunities lie out there -- what ways there are to fulfill both your personal interests and goals, and simultaneously contribute to society. Each story is a little, sometimes immensely different from the others. In terms of careers, you have doctors, academics, food critics, and students -- and in terms of age, you run a veritable gamut from fresh SPM leavers to freshly minted PhDs like Kian Ming.

Every person writing is at a different stage in life, and pursuing a different life path, which is what makes this book both so useful and so interesting. Even if you would never want to be a fitness trainer or a political scientist, simply understanding how people find their callings -- and how they are continually refining their understanding of what they are called to be -- is so valuable. It does not matter how old you are or where in life you may be. My father, who by right should be beginning to think about how he will spend his retirement years, could not stop talking about the book, recommending it to all his friends. I could not put the book down either.

My personal take away from the book is that we have to embrace some degree of uncertainty about life before finding where we are called to be. Kian Ming's story is actually a good example of this -- he relates how his career as a corporate high flier was suddenly cut short, and how he stumbled around looking for his calling. But I find that almost everyone writing has something similar to share about how they had to cast around before figuring out what was right for them.

The uncertainty of this may sound frightening, but I find it an empowering message for everyone, young or old, because we are in charge of our own destinies. This book is in many ways the perfect antidote for the rigidities of SPM and our general education system, where once you are in the arts or science stream, you are ostensibly set for life. (Science stream people all become engineers or doctors, and arts stream people all become VCD sellers or fishermen, right?) What's After SPM is the perfect way to make a youth think about their future, and encourage them to take responsibility for figuring out who they want to be.

After heaping all this glowing praise on the book, you might think it is flawless. But while it is no doubt a fascinating and useful read, it could do with some improvement. The cover of the book is not terribly distinctive (I couldn't find it in the bookstore and had to ask for assistance when I was buying a copy for a friend), making it hard to stand out on the shelf. The organisation of the book is a simple ordering of each essay by the author's name alphabetically. While this is good for casual reading or flipping through, other organisational schemes might have added more value. Perhaps organising the book roughly by age of author, or type of essay, would have been good.

Probably the most annoying thing for a returning reader is that if you read a fascinating essay by that social entrepreneur or this doctor, and want to find it again, you need to remember the author's name or the essay's title. There is no index of topics covered in the book. This is quite a big oversight, and I hope the editors will address this in a future edition.

In spite of those caveats, I cannot recommend this book more wholeheartedly. Buy it for the primary or secondary school student in your life; buy it for the fresh graduate clueless about his prospects; buy it for the professional with a mid-life crisis; buy it for yourself. At the very least, you will find these stories interesting -- at best, you will have a whole new, fresh perspective on life.

You can get your copy from MPH or Borders. MPH MidValley is hosting the official book launch this August 6; I encourage you to attend and hear from some of the amazing Malaysians behind this project.

The Sun "Malaysia and Me" writing contest

2011-06-29T02:12:00.002+08:00

The Sun is running a "Malaysia and Me" writing competition for Malaysians between the ages of 15 and 30. If you are a student or youth, this is an excellent chance to participate in an important conversation about the future of our country. Details follow after the jump.

HAVE you something interesting to say about your country and you? On any aspect that inspires you or delights you or even annoys you?

If you do, share it with your fellow Malaysians by taking part in the
theSun-1MDB ‘Malaysia and Me’ Writing Competition which closes on July
29.

The top three prizes are RM5,000, RM3,000 and RM2,000. There are also 10
Consolation Prizes of RM500 each.

If you are a Malaysian between the ages of 15 and 30, you are eligible to
take part, and can send in as many as three entries.

Your entry must be your own original work, and it must not have been
published before.

The competition is organised by theSun in conjunction with Merdeka 2011,
with the aim of encouraging literary expression by Malaysian youths.
We’ve kept the boundaries open by calling it simply a “writing
competition”. This means you can write in any genre you wish.

Exercise your imagination. You can of course write an essay to address
the ‘Malaysia and Me’ theme. But if you feel you can best express it
in a poem, go for it. Or if you want to write a letter to your country or
anyone in particular, that’s also fine. So is writing a short story or
even a short play with dialogue and action.

Just be sure to keep to a maximum of 1,500 words. There is, however, no
minimum.

The judging will be done by an independent panel of professional experts,
and they will be looking for the most creative entries. With substance
too, of course.

To ensure impartiality in the judging, the names of the participants will
not be made known to the panel. As such, you must make sure that your
name does not appear on any part of your entry. It should appear only in
the entry form, together with other required particulars and the title of
your entry.

Do take note that the title of your entry must also appear on every page
of your entry.

Entry forms are available in the printed edition of theSun and online at
www.sun2surf.com.

You can e-mail in your entries or send them by snail mail, but each entry
must be accompanied by an entry form.

All entries must reach the office of theSun no later than 6pm on July 29,
2011.

You can find out more about the competition in theSun newspaper or log on
to www.thesundaily.my

Mari Kita Membaca, a worthy cause

2011-01-07T22:12:00.002+08:00

Philanthropic giving is a big thing in the USA, a cottage industry almost. About 2 out of every 3 American households gives to charity annually -- it's not something that just Bill Gates and Warren Buffett do. Unfortunately, not many communities outside the US have yet developed a similar culture of giving. If you're interested in doing something for charity though, some friends recently founded Mari Kita Membaca, a charity which gives books to libraries and pre-schools in isolated Orang Asli villages. One of them wrote to me explaining the project:

We started just a few months ago and in a nutshell, we fundraise to send books to orang asli villages which already have community learning centers. We screen and select villages that we think will benefit the most out of getting the books and after consultation with local teachers, we help them buy the books that would assist them in their curriculum. It's not a very big operation, but we do what we can. We have a pretty quick turnover of our cash, and 100% of it goes towards buying the books and any delivery expenses.

It's definitely a worthy cause, and if you're interested in helping or finding out more, check out the Mari Kita Membaca website: http://www.marikitamembaca.org/

Otak Otak: placing students in high-quality internships

2010-12-09T12:00:00.002+08:00

I can tell you from personal experience that getting a good internship in Malaysia is hard. There is no easy way to discern the good from the bad, and very few companies even have actual internship programmes. Those few that do tend to offer mixed results, with interns often feeling they are an afterthought and an adjunct to the organisation's work. (When I talk with friends who intern at local banks, they often have more stories to tell about running the photocopiers and buying kuih than they do about actual finance-related work.)

Of course, where there's a problem, there's an opportunity. Some friends have set up Otak Otak, a project to match qualified interns with good companies, and provide structure to the internship programmes. They are currently looking for companies interested in hiring competent interns for a month or two, as well as interested students looking for internship opportunities in Malaysia. The website is otak2.com; more details after the jump.

Otak-Otak : An Elite Internship Program for Future Malaysian Leaders

What is it : Otak-Otak is a highly selective leadership program for interns to be held during the June - July 2011 period. We are looking to accept 50 top students and place them in leading organisations across 4 sectors in Malaysia - the corporate sector, small businesses, goverment, and the non profit realm. All interns will have access to events most evenings after work (networking, site visits, training from corporates), and also share common accomodation - with regular sharing and development sessions planned.

Why it's important : This is a unique oppurtunity for students to participate in a highly selective program of its kind and share experiences with other students who are going through the same program. It will be the first year (of many to come) for a very innovative program that will allow young Malaysians to work at top companies across KL and at the same time be part of a larger group.

How to Apply : Application details and more program information can be found at www.otak2.com

Studying the brain drain

2010-11-06T09:21:00.005+08:00

With the announcement of a Talent Corporation to bring home Malaysians who've gone overseas, this research — Plugging the Brain Drain — seems relevant. The findings are quite accessible to the layperson, but if you have a little statistical background, you'll definitely get a chance to grapple with some of the most extensive publicly-available analysis of our brain drain (that I know of, at any rate).

It has its flaws, especially with regard to data collection (full disclosure: Kian Ming and I helped the author with some of the statistical analysis), but it is of course only an initial foray into studying the reasons behind why Malaysians leave — or come home. If you have any comments, do post them here or contact the author, Evelyn Wong, directly. Also do share if you know of any similar studies, or scholars working on this topic!

Vacation Research Programme for Form 5 Students

2010-10-24T06:23:00.001+08:00

We were recently alerted to the existence of a programme called The Vacation Research Programme. All Form 5 students are eligible to apply; those accepted will be placed with medical researchers at various institutions in the country. This looks like an interesting research opportunity for interested secondary school students. The website is http://vacationresearchprogramme.wordpress.com/.

Taking False Pride: Are these accomplishments Malaysian?

2010-10-21T12:34:00.005+08:00

Eds.: The following is written by Tee Sui Seng, a Cantabrigian.

The news that a Malaysian has been recognized as the top law student at the University of Cambridge initially filled me with much joy and pride and I wasted no time in letting my friends from all over the world know that we Malaysians are more than able to hold our own academically amongst the best brains in the world.However, this feeling of pride gradually gave way to a more sobering disappointment and eventually, even a little embarrassment as the facts of the story slowly sunk in.

It did not take long to find out that the young man in question has spent his pre-university days in neighbouring Singapore, taking his A-levels on a scholarship there. This then led to the discovery that our dear neighbours very quickly realised his talents and wasted no time in offering him a scholarship to the University of Cambridge. It then came as no surprise why further down the article, it was then stated that our prodigious young talent will be joining the Singapore legal service.

This disappointment was poignant, but however, upon further reflection, should have been expected. The local media can never be accused of lacking patriotism. The newspapers have always been very quick to seize upon stories of successful Malaysians all over the world and credit must definitely be given to them for sourcing them out. Unfortunately, these reporters may have sometimes been a little over-zealous by stretching the Malaysian connection a little too far. A recent example that comes to mind would be the appointment of the Malaysian-born Penny Wong as finance minister in Australia. I dare not assume to know how much the minister would take pride in her Malaysian connection, but I am assuming that becoming a minister of a nation state would definitely require taking up citizenship of that country. It then follows that since Malaysia does not allow dual-citizenships, the good minister's Malaysian connections would be distant at best.

Patriotism is a virtue if we know what to be thankful and grateful for. The accident of being born in a certain nation state is not reason enough to imbue one with a sense of pride for being a citizen - this pride needs to come from appreciating one's achievements in the context of the opportunities that are endowed with being part of that nation. If the achievements of an individual cannot be attributed to the opportunities gained by being part of the nation state, we must then be very careful in sharing the accolades that were showered upon an individual who happens to share our citizenship.

Upon further reflection, the news article was about the achievements of a young man, who did exceedingly well in Law at the University of Cambridge, who clearly impressed his very experienced tutors there and who has also shown tremendous humility when talking about his achievements. It is only mere coincidence that this young man is also Malaysian. When we as a country has shown little effort or foresight to acknowledge or reward his talents before these accolades, we should not be too quick to claim collective pride over his praise.

All is not lost - at the very least, we are heartened by the fact that the country has no lack of talented citizens, although the sceptical among us would very quickly question how long we can retain them. Much has been said about the brain drain from all layers of the society including those in power, so the severity of the problem is nothing new. Now let's hope the next news story would be how we are successful in luring these minds back onto our shores. In the mean time, it would probably be wise to be a little less excited the next time a Malaysian connection arises in the news. We can only share praise if we have invested in it, lest we be too distracted in cheering our neighbours on to mourn our own loss.

Research/Interview Request

2010-09-14T16:16:00.000+08:00

Hi,

My name is I Lin Sin and I'm a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Edinburgh. I've just arrived in Malaysia for fieldwork. Over the next few months, I will be looking for and chatting with various individuals to inform my study on the link between a UK degree and the occupational and status advancement of young adult Malaysians. If your profile meets the following characteristics, I would like to invite you to take part in my research:

* Malaysian, aged 18-30 years
* Student studying in Malaysia for a UK degree(via offshore or transnational modes of study, e.g. 3+0 programmes, etc.)

OR

* Recent graduate (2-5 years after graduation)
* Studied for a UK degree(in the UK or/and in Malaysia)
* Currently working in Malaysia
* Malaysian, aged up to 30 years

The research will take the form of a face-to-face, casual and private conversation with me. Simple and straightforward questions will be asked. Key themes will include the advantages and disadvantages of having a UK education, strategies to obtain a job and feelings and aspirations in relation to the transition from studies to work.

The interview conversation will take about an hour and will be conducted in a suitably quiet location (usually in cafes and college/campus grounds) in PJ or KL, central to the participant and me as the researcher. There is a slight possibility that I'll extend my fieldwork site to Penang, but this will come at a later stage. The interview will be recorded in audio to allow a detailed examination of data. No one other than myself will have access to the recording and the participant's identity will be kept strictly anonymous. My study is subject to the university's ethical guidelines and hence, the participant can be assured that I will take the necessary measures to conduct my research responsibly.

The findings of the research will contribute to my PhD thesis and will be shared in various forms such as published journal articles and presentation in seminars and conferences. Very little is known about this topic, so your participation will be very useful in guiding understanding on the study and work experiences of young Malaysians. This is an excellent opportunity for those interested in learning more about the nature and dynamics of an academic social research.

I look forward to chatting with you and learning about your experiences. I can be contacted at: I.Sin@sms.ed.ac.uk.

In support of Parent Action Group for Education Malaysia (PAGE)

2010-09-11T13:07:00.001+08:00

Read this for more information. I support this kind of grass roots, bottom up initiative. Sokong!

Scrapping UPSR & PMR: MoE Roundtable

2010-07-28T12:16:00.001+08:00

Educationists and parents want UPSR, PMR to stay
UPDATED @ 03:21:48 PM 27-07-2010By Boo Su-Lyn July 27, 2010

PUTRAJAYA, July 27 — Political parties and educationists want the UPSR and PMR public examinations retained, an Education Ministry dialogue was told today.

Representatives from political parties like DAP and MIC and non-governmental organisations such as the Parent Action Group for Education Malaysia (PAGE) and the United Chinese School Committees Association of Malaysia (Dong Zong) said that today’s meeting of about 40 representatives saw a chorus of reservation against abolishing the two public examinations.

“Majority do not agree to abolish both,” said Dong Zong representative Dr Lai Hoi Chaw today.

“Majority also thought this exam system has to be modified,” he added, saying that creative content should be increased in the examination system.

Lai, the deputy director of the Malaysian Independent Chinese Secondary School Unified Examination Committee under Dong Zong, said that Dong Zong rejected the UPSR move until the government proposed a detailed alternative student assessment system.

“We do not agree to abolish UPSR immediately until we know more about the alternative formula,” Lai said, adding that the group would also decide on the matter of PMR when an alternative assessment system was proposed.

Lai also demanded for the school-based assessment proposal by Malaysia Examination Board director Datuk Dr Salbiah Ismail at the discussion today to be made public.

Salbiah’s proposal included creating an internal school assessment system and a guided methodology on how to conduct assessments up to the Form 5 SPM level, as well as implementing “psychometric tests” on students’ emotions and character, said DAP national publicity secretary Tony Pua.

Pua said Salbiah’s proposal showed that the Education Ministry seemed to have decided to scrap the two public examinations even before talks were completed.

Education Director-General Tan Sri Alimuddin Mohd Dom said last week that a report on the roundtable discussions would be submitted to the Education Minister by the end of August.

The ministry’s first official roundtable discussion took place on July 19, and was attended by over 120 educators, district education officers and teachers’ unions representatives.

The National Union of the Teaching Profession (NUTP), the Sarawak Teachers’ Union, the West Malaysia Malay Teachers’ Union, and education academics reportedly favoured replacing the two public examinations with school-based assessments.

However, PAGE chairman Datin Noor Azimah Abdul Rahim said that her organisation favoured retaining the two public examinations because a school-based assessment system was open to abuse.

“If we were to rely on school-based assessment, it is subject to manipulation, leaks, favouritism. A national assessment is independent,” said Azimah.

“Most (in the discussion) were in favour of keeping both (examinations), but with the adjustments of making it better,” added Azimah, pointing out that the focus of the current examination system on rote should be replaced with more open-ended questions.

Academic Tan Sri Datuk Seri Panglima Dr Abdul Rahman Arshad also called for the rigid examination system to be revised instead of abolishing UPSR and PMR.

“We must change the nature of the exam. You don’t demolish everything,” said the University-College Sedaya International chancellor.

“A good number are for adjustments to be made,” added Abdul Rahman.

MIC representative Tan Sri Professor T. Marimuthu said that his party was against scrapping the UPSR and PMR examinations, citing concerns of a school-based assessment system that is open to abuse.

“We are concerned about teacher load and teacher bias in a school-based assessment,” said the MIC education committee chairman.

Marimuthu added that the MIC wanted UPSR especially to be retained and for the government to address the pressure faced by UPSR students.

“Any change must be based on informed research. I am not sure what research has been done on this,” said Marimuthu, adding that majority in the discussion wanted to retain the two public examinations.

The DAP is also against scrapping the UPSR and PMR examinations and claimed yesterday that students performed better when subjected to public examinations as shown by international research.

“If the government is insistent in proceeding, as it appears to be, to scrap the exams, do a pilot project first,” said Pua, adding that the government should compare those who took public examinations and those who did not after several years.

“The consequence of scrapping exams for the whole country at one go is a highly risky move. We call for the (Education) Ministry not to repeat the mistake of PPSMI,” said Pua, pointing out that Putrajaya had proceeded with implementing the policy of teaching science and mathematics in English despite public reservation but was forced to abolish it a few years later.

Academic Studies Support Retaining Examinations

2010-07-27T11:33:00.000+08:00

The call by Ministry of Education to abolish UPSR and PMR examinations must not be based on proper quantitative and qualitative studies and not based on unsubstantiated fads or whims of the day

The Ministry of Education is currently studying seriously on the proposal to abolish UPSR and PMR examinations in order to improve the standards of education and to create more “thinking” students rather than those relying purely on 'regurgitation' to pass examinations.

The response from the public and interested parties to date has been generally in favour of such abolition, with some expressing reservation.

I'll like to call upon the Ministry of Education to conduct a more scientific or quantitative study determine the effects of examinations on a student and his or her achievements before taking the hasty and drastic measure of abolishing examinations only to suffer irreversible damage to the quality of our education subsequently.

There are a lot of studies conducted by academics at top universities around the world on the impact of “central exams” and their effects on the educational achievements of the students. Most of these studies however almost always concludes that central examinations have substantial positive impact on the students. The following findings by eminent academics are as follow:

1. “How Central Exams Affect Educational Achievement: International Evidence from TIMSS and TIMSS-Repeat” by Ludger Woessmann (2002) of John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

The data used in the paper are sourced from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS; 1994-1995) and the TIMSS-Repeat (1998-1999) covering 40 nations. They include performance data in both math and science for about 450,000 students, as well as background data on families, school resources and institutional setting for individual students, teachers and schools.

This study showed that “students in countries with central exit-exam systems perform 35 to 47 percent of an international standard deviation in test scores better in their middle-school years in both mathematics and science than students in countries without central exams.”

2. “The Effect Of Central Exit Examinations On Student Achievement: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From TIMSS Germany” by Hendrik Jürges & Kerstin Schneider & Felix Büchel, 2003.

This paper makes use of the regional variation in schooling legislation within the German secondary education system to estimate the effect of central exit examinations on student performance. The study concluded that “students in federal states with central exit examinations clearly outperform students in other federal states” although they did qualify that part of the difference could be attributable to other factors.

3. “Are National Exit Examinations Important for Educational Eﬃciency?” by John H. Bishop (1999), Cornell University

Students in countries with national exit exams exams tend to outperform students in other countries in science, math, reading, and geography, when national economic development levels are accounted for.

A study of the elimination of the Swedish exit examination system in the 1970s, in combination with changes in the way university applicants were selected, also “appears to have led to a decline in the number of upper secondary school students taking rigorous courses in mathematics and science.”

This study covered extensively data sourced from (i) TIMSS, (ii) the reading literacy of 14 year olds in the International Association of the Evaluation of Educational Achievement's (IEA) Reading Study, Science, (iii) math and geography scores of 13 year olds on the International Assessment of Educational Progress (IAEP) for 16 nations and (iv) Science and math scores of 13 year olds in nine Canadian provinces.

4. “The Effect of National Standard and Curriculum-Based Exams on Achievement” by John H. Bishop (1997)

In this study, Bishop concluded that “our review of the evidence suggests that the claims of the advocates of standards and examination based reform of American secondary education my be right. The countries and Canadian provinces with such system outperform other countries at comparable levels of development.

This study also looked at the (i) TIMSS data, (ii) the International Assessment of Educational Progress 1991 covering 15 nations including England, Switzerland, Taiwan and Korea and (iii) the Canada IAEP 1990-91 with data from more than 1,400 schools.

Studies which provides contrary conclusions are few and far in between and often focuses on the negative impact of excessive stress on a student while accepting that a moderate amount of stress for the students is beneficial in terms of student achievement.

Given the above studies, I'll like to reiterate my earlier assertion that it is the nature of examinations and teaching methods which will determine the quality of student achievements and not the fact as to whether examinations are abolished.

Even if the UPSR and PMR is abolished, but the nature of the Form 5 SPM examination as well as the teaching methods and quality remains unchanged, then the student output from our education system will remain little changed from what it is today. In fact, the removal of examinations may disincentivise students, particularly from the lower income groups as well as from families with lower educational qualifications to fare worse than before due to the lack of uniform achievement standards.

The Colour of Scholarships – By Azira Aziz

2010-07-21T06:50:00.002+08:00

Ed.: The following is an article we received written by a former student of law at Universiti Teknologi Mara.

When Najib proposed to open scholarship opportunities to all top scorers, particularly 9A’s and above, I saluted the move and thought nothing more of the matter. A politician buckling to popular tit-bits is nothing new and at least he’s heading in the right direction.

However, it irked me as the usual Malay-rights groups, the Perkasa-led Malay Consultative Council (MPM) responded to it with “constructive” criticisms, claiming that it should instead reflect 67% of the Malay community in Malaysia.

My response to this is this: firstly, Professor Datuk Dr Kamarudin Kachar, not all 67% are Malaysian Malays. Some of them are actually assimilated Indonesians whose parents holds red MyKads.

Many Malaysians are denied opportunities on the fallacy that they are of the wrong ethnicity and that they are less likely to be “loyal” to Malaysia. Instead, as long as you are a “Malay,” “imported” or not, you are entitled to a scholarship, and admittance to heavily subsidised boarding schools.

I am not saying that despite Malaysian-born students of Indonesian parentage are intelligent enough, they do not deserve scholarships by virtue of their parents being immigrants. Quite the contrary, hard work and diligence should always be rewarded. I know some of these kids – they’ve studied hard and they should be awarded where deserved. I am simply pointing out how our education system discriminates Malaysians.

I think it ridiculous that descendants of immigrants are awarded privileges denied to generations born and raised Malaysians by basis of race and religion. The argument that affirmative action policies are meant to help the Malays falls here. Right to education of citizens of Malaysia distributed on basis of race and religion is sanctioned by the State on no moral or ethical grounds, but on purely the in-group and out-group mentality.

Why develop descendants of immigrants while neglecting and disparaging our own purely because they are different from the acceptable “original” settlers of Malaya?

Secondly, many people view further education as the only way to break the cycle of poverty and as a means to social mobility. In short, education is the only way to help provide for your parents and your siblings.

It is the only way you can protect the rights of your family and your properties against bad people. It is that golden gateway to a better life. The cycle of poverty is not specifically restricted to the Malays in the rural areas.

There are the rural and urban poor, and despite the differences in skin colour, private religious beliefs, and dietary preferences, they are no less human than your average Muhammad. Everyone is the same; we worry about grades, food, shelter, girlfriend/boyfriend, parents, allowances, and etc.

It is our political parties that continuously indoctrinate us into thinking in terms of “Malay” and “non-Malay” as “human” and “less human,” or “us” and “them.” There is no reason whatsoever for racial quotas for scholarships to be sanctioned as we are all homo sapiens, humans who are essentially the same.

Thirdly, as I have observed before Malays as a community celebrates mediocrity. The concept of fear, self-guilt, insecurity and excessive emotional response is propagated through the most dangerous of tools: religion.

Even places of worship; such as the surau and mosques are not exempt from political intrigue. I am sick and tired of watching and listening to beautiful scriptures of the Holy Quran literally taken out of context and manipulated to suit the purposes of the elite, wealthy, and privileged to maintain their power base. I know I shouldn’t be surprised, the scripts are all written and approved by the state’s religious body, but it does make it more questionable, does it not?

It is no secret that as a collective, humans are fairly obtuse. The common sense of the pacifist few often escapes them, and therefore the masterful skill of the other few who promulgates hatred, suspicion, and utter ignorance carries more conviction as truth than the message of universal love and harmony.

How Malays love their drama enam petang. The ever present threat of imaginary enemies was created to divert blame and responsibility from themselves.

Fourthly, I do not see this as a point of conflict for anyone affected by the change of policies. The way I see it, the Malay boys and girls will instead be told that they actually deserve the grades that they acquired through their own sweat and midnight candle-burning, being told to have self-esteem and that they can do whatever they set their mind to, and being told that they do not need crutches at all to achieve their dreams and help their families.

The only people, who dramatise an otherwise positive move for all youths in this country alike, are people who feel threatened by the lack of dependence and growing confidence of the previously trodden majority, those who feels that to keep being relevant, they needed to bully and put others down in their places so that they could feel better about themselves.

Finally, I recommend several criteria as a basis of Federal Scholarships. Scholarships should only be dealt out to members of the lower-middle to poverty level students who exhibited excellent co-curicular achievements as well as reasonably good grades. A well-balanced individual is the best product that could be produced by only the best of institutions.

Students from these demographic tend to appreciate their education more, as well as the public knowledge of taxpayer monies well spent. Furthermore, the upper-middle class and above should be completely disqualified from eligibility to these scholarships, and should instead be encouraged to take up PTPTN or consider other financial options.

Most of them can afford private education, anyway. Another favourite suggestion by a friend of mine is to completely do away with overseas scholarships and force everyone to study in local universities.

This is due to the fact that once given an opportunity to go abroad, the precious few brainy ones upon considering the socio-political circumstances in Malaysia, choose not to return. Our education coffers shall also be saved, and can be channeled to improve dilapidated Tamil and Orang Asli primary or secondary schools or increase salaries of long-suffering teachers.

For the record, I turned down scholarships because I genuinely believe that it should go to people who really need them. I find it unfair that students who can afford original Guess, DKNY and Chanel were also awarded scholarships when they obviously need it not.

My, what a long rant in reply to one man’s few sentences. Well, I have said my two cents. In conclusion, I truly believe on Federal Scholarships for those who deserve it by merit and based on their family’s financial background. Any thoughts, anyone?

In her own words – Azira Aziz is a mongrel Malaysian who hopes to have “Malay” and “non-Malay” relegated as a relic of the past sometime in the future. A graduate from UiTM, and is currently undergoing training to become a lawyer.

The State of Higher Education in Malaysia

2010-07-10T13:20:00.000+08:00

Expensive race to higher education

SAT, 10 JUL 2010 06:00

By Ken Vin Lek

SPECIAL FOCUS KUALA LUMPUR: Higher education is a passport to a better life, but unfortunately many Malaysian students do not enjoy easy access to it. More often than not, it is a goal they seek but cannot attain. It has seemingly become a privilege and not a right.

If given a chance, many would want to enter and graduate from top-notch universities in the US and UK. But the reality is that the route to these prestigious institutions is out of reach and many are left stranded at home.

What future do they have in Malaysia? Access to higher education to local public institutions of higher education is limited. A quota system introduced under the New Economic Policy (NEP) in 1970 and spiralling fees in private institutions have not helped matters.

There are currently 20 public universities and 627 higher education institutions (IPT), with Universiti Malaya being the oldest university in the country.

According to PJ Utara MP, Tony Pua, this was more than double in proportion to the population when compared to Singapore.

Under the 10th Malaysia Plan (10MP), the government does not intend to establish any more new public universities, while the private sector will not be prevented from setting up private institutions of higher learning.

FMT takes an indepth look at the trend emerging in Malaysia’s higher education system.

Only 29% obtain higher education qualifications

According to a report published by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (Unesco) in 2005, only 29.9% of Malaysians obtained higher education qualifications.

In contrast, both Singapore and Thailand have a higher percentage of population with tertiary education qualifications at 46% and 41% respectively, while in South Korea a whopping 89% of its population boasts higher education qualifications -- three times the percentage of Malaysia.

Said Professor James Chin, head of Arts of Monash University Malaysia: “Malaysia can never be a developed country if the rate remains this low. On the one hand, we have the problem of quality; on the other, the problem of percentage.”

“Quality is obviously harder to improve, and we are nowhere near becoming a knowledge-based economy,” he added.

FMT did a study of the many publications of the Higher Education Ministry and came up with a startling fact: only one in 60 secondary school students in the 1960s had access to higher education, and this trend is still rising today.

Malaysia, however, has set a target: it wants to see 40% of the population in the 19-24 age group enjoy access to higher education by 2020.

Fahmi Reza, a Student Power activist, has over the years been vehemently advocating that higher education be made a right and not a privilege.

“Everyone in this country deserves to get access to higher education... we must realise that obtaining a degree gives an individual an edge over another person who probably had no access to higher education... this is blatantly unfair,” he said.

Going corporate

Under the 10MP, it appears that the government is moving towards corporatising public universities in Malaysia.

According to a report by the Higher Education Ministry, some 50% of public funds for higher education will be disbursed based on the needs of the government by 2015 and 25% of all public university places will be fee-paying seats.

Currently, the government subsidises all seats in public institutions of higher learning at the rate of 90%. Students only have to fork out a meagre fee for critical courses. The government sets aside as much as RM8.5 billion a year subsidising fees of these institutions.

A medical student, for example, only has to pay RM19,000 to complete the course, with the government subsidising RM181,000. An engineering student only has to pay RM10,760, with the government subsidising RM94,644.

When asked about the trend to make seats fee-paying ones, Chin said the government has no choice but to move towards this direction.

“This is a worldwide trend, especially in countries like the UK where the numbers of seats have been dropping and the US where higher education is viewed as a privilege and where one benefits substantially from having a degree.”

“The only problem is that if we take this route, there will be repercussions -- if one has to pay for a service, the quality has to be there and quality has always been a problem faced by IPTs in Malaysia,” Chin said.

According to a report released by the Ministry of Higher Education, between 2001 and 2010, 15% of the students who had access to higher education were enrolled in public institutions, while another 15% were studying in private ones.

It is predicted that by 2020 as many as 90% of higher education students will have to go through a private institution to obtain their degree.

But if the education system is moving towards a corporate, fee-paying culture, how many Malaysian families can afford to send their children to institutions of higher learning?

When FMT did a random survey of fees charged by universities, it was found that for an individual to pursue medicine at the International Medical University (IMU), he would need RM351,000 or RM5,850 a month to finance his studies, excluding the cost of living.

Considering that more than half of Malaysian households earn a monthly income of less than RM3,000 (according to the Department of Statistics), few students can afford to pay their way to a tertiary education without getting a scholarship or a bank loan.

Mushrooming of private institutions

Private universities did not come into existence in Malaysia until 1996. Prior to that, many Malaysians who could not obtain a place in local public institutions but who had the money, would pursue their tertiary studies overseas.

In the 1990s, only 7.2% of Malaysians at university age were enrolled in local tertiary institutions, compared with 35.8% in Argentina and 54.8% in South Korea.

Private institutions emerged because of the lack of places in public institutions. Moreover, Malaysians who pursued overseas studies had also caused a large outflow of currency.

According to a 1995 Unesco report, some 20% or 50,000 Malaysians were studying abroad and this cost the country about US$800 million a year in currency outflow, constituting nearly 12% of the country’s current deficit.

Given this scenario, the government enacted the Private Higher Educations Institutions Act in 1996, which gave birth to private institutions.

Since 1996, the number of private institutions had been mushrooming, starting with six universities in 1990 and growing to 69 in 2010.

Many government-linked companies and political parties saw the rapid growth of private educational bodies as an opportunity to make money.

Universiti Tun Abdul Razak (Unitar) owned by Umno was formed in 1998; Tunku Abdul Rahman College (KTAR), owned by MCA, was set up in 1969; Asian Institute of Medicine, Science and Technology University (AIMST), owned by MIC, was launched in 2001, and Gerakan-owned Wawasan Open University was established in 2005.

Chin sees the growth of these institutions in a positive light. “Malaysia made the right decision. A lot of people back then could not get places, the majority of whom were non-Bumiputeras,” he said.

Pua also concurred, saying that the move (to set up private institutions) has benefited the non-Bumiputeras because it is cheaper now to pursue a degree locally.

“The problem, however, is quality. There is nothing wrong with setting up private institutions but there has to be quality. Don't just think of making money.

“If you read the advertisements published by these institutions, all of them boast they are quality institutions.”

Pua suggested that an independent organisation be formed to rank these universities so that the public will be well informed of their competency.

It is worth noting that private institutions have a significantly lower percentage of academic staff with PhD qualifications than those in public institutions and this could affect the quality of education delivered.

An unintended racial divide?

When FMT did a survey of the vast distinctions between public and private institutions, it was discovered that a significant racial divide existed in these institutions.

Currently, private institutions consist of 95% non-Bumiputera students while 70% of students in the public institutions are Bumiputeras.

Said Fahmi: “Surely, the government did not intend it to be that way but this is clearly the outcome of the NEP, which made it compulsory for 70% of seats in public universities to be allocated to Bumiputeras.”

He added that this is completely against Article 12 of the Federal Constitution which states, “Without prejudice, there shall be no discrimination against any citizen on the grounds only of religion, race, descent or place of birth in administration of any educational institution maintained by public authority, in particular admission of pupils.”

Chin, however, was of the view that the blatant implementation of such a ratio in public universities left non-Bumiputeras with no other choice but to head to private institutions to pursue tertiary education.

The biggest loser

The group worst affected in the race to tertiary education is the poorer sections of the ethnic minorities.

They are left behind by private institutions because they lack funds to finance themselves. They are left behind by public institutions due to the quota system. Their only hope is to obtain brilliant results so that they can secure a scholarship, lead a better life and get out of the poverty trap.

The Perennial Scholarship Controversy

2010-06-26T14:53:00.001+08:00

PSD scholarships – to scrap or not to scrap
SAT, 26 JUN 2010 06:11

By Ken Vin Lek

KUALA LUMPUR: Every year around the months of May and June, hundreds of “straight A” SPM students receive the news of not being offered the “illustrious” Public Service Department (PSD) scholarship.

Thousands of complaints are made by various parties, the issue becomes politicised and many people start crying out about the injustice and inequality existing in the system of allocating scholarships.

Recently, Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak announced that PSD scholarships would be phased out over time, and he was promptly supported by Minister in the Prime Minister's Department, Nazri Aziz, who said that the move is an effort to “reduce brain drain” and that the government “lacked capacity” to fund students.

FMT has made an indepth study into the arguments surrounding the PSD scholarship issue, and we leave it to the public to make up their mind on what’s right and what’s wrong.

Many parties have questioned the suitability of using the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) as a benchmark for PSD scholarships.

PJ Utara MP, Tony Pua, questioned the process of awarding scholarship at SPM level and instead suggested that students be picked based on their pre-university qualifications.

“The problem now is, we have too many top scorers for only 1,500 scholarships on offer. We should use pre-university qualifications as the benchmark as it is of a higher threshold and students would have then gained admission into top-class universities.”

“What we are doing now is, we are pre-determining whether one is suitable for courses like Medicine and Law based on the SPM results without the students receiving any offers from universities to pursue these subjects,” he added.

Pua also criticised Nazri for linking the phasing-out of scholarships to an effort to reduce the brain drain.

“It is nonsense to say that phasing out scholarships can actually reduce the brain drain. We all know foreign institutions are capable of developing talented leaders in their various fields,” he said.

For full article with in-depth analysis, click here.

Scrapping UPSR & PMR A Good Move?

2010-06-22T19:47:00.000+08:00

The Ministry of Education must not be hasty in scrapping all examinations which will create far reaching consequences for our human capital development

Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin had announced that the Ujian Penilaian Sekolah Rendah (UPSR) and Penilaian Menengah Rendah (PMR) examinations may be abolished as “part of government efforts to restructure the learning system that as seen as too examination oriented and failed to provide a holistic education.”

I would like to express our thanks to the DPM for also stating that “the ministry would not act in haste and wanted the public to give feedback to help improve the public examination system.”

I would like to urge extreme caution from the Education Ministry on the potential move to scrap examination despite the noble objectives to “avoid producing machines” as explained by the Deputy Education Minister Wee Ka Siong.

I are in complete agreement that we should reform our education system to prevent it from “producing robots”. However, we need to first understand the cause of failure in our education system which isn't a result of having examinations per se.

Firstly, without first changing our teaching systems to encourage creativity, critical thinking and innovation, removing examinations will make little or no difference to the quality of education for our students. For example, if the quality and ability of the teachers remain unchanged, then quality of output will make little difference. Instead, because of the lack of a standardised assessment system, the outcome might actually deteriorate due to the lack of objective measures.

Secondly, the problem of studying for examinations and producing students who focus on memorising and regurgitating answers is in the nature of questions itself. Very simply, if the examination questions today are orientated towards memorised answers, then understandably, the students will be focused on memorising answers. However, if the questions are oriented towards challenging a students thinking skills, then certainly, the students will have little choice but to be more analytical.

For example, a question on history at PMR level may ask “What year did the Portugese conquer Melaka?”. In this case, the student has no choice but to memorise the year “1511”.

Alternatively, the question could ask “Why did Melaka lose to the Portugese?”. In this case, there's a greater element of subjectivity, but the students may still be able to a certain degree, memorise part of the answers.

However, if the question were to ask “Was it inevitable that Melaka would lose to the Portugese in 1511?”, then a student would have no choice but to evaluate the facts which he has in hand and provide measured answers as to whether the defeat was “inevitable”. Such questions would certainly encourage greater critical thinking for what we want isn't memorised facts but weighted opinions, for and against.

In addition, such subjective questions which demands critical thinking and analysis by the students will require equally trained teachers who understands the value of such analysis, with emphasis not just on whether the student got the facts right, but whether the student demonstrated their ability to think.

Therefore, we would like to emphasize to the Education Minister that the critical success factor to producing “thinking” students, as opposed to “regurgitating machines” likes with the teachers, the teaching system as well as the nature of examinations.

The proposal to scrap examinations is not the miracle cure to producing analytical students, and may actually produce negative and unintended outcomes on the average quality of Malaysian students.

Learn more about the US university system and application process

2010-06-03T17:00:00.004+08:00

My friends and I are running a series of workshops in several cities from this month through August on the US university system and its application process. There'll be one-day sessions in Kota Kinabalu, Kuching, Penang and the Klang Valley, and a longer two-day workshop only in the Klang Valley in August.

The info sessions will give you an idea of what the US university system is like, and an overview of how to apply. They're FREE. The workshop will explain in depth how to apply, and since it lasts over two days, we'll cover a lot more material. There's more information on dates and venue at the website.

If you're a Malaysian thinking about university, or know someone who is, I can guarantee you this will be useful (it's something most of us wish we had when we were in your shoes). At the least, it'll help you learn about your options (including financial support -- the US is pretty amazing as far as scholarships go).

Even if you're not thinking about the US, it's worth attending. The UK and Australia are the default and often expensive options for most Malaysians considering a foreign university, but hardly anyone thinks about the US. There's no good reason for this to be the case. Hell, if you can get in, a lot of universities will throw money at you to convince you to attend.

All of us running the workshops are either students or alumni; no university or for-profit group is funding our activities. It's a great chance to learn about an underappreciated overseas opportunity.

Space is limited, so sign up soon! You can register on the website.

Silence of the Mahasiswas

2010-05-31T23:23:00.000+08:00

Silence of the mahasiswas — Lee Lian Kong
May 31, 2010

There is a Bob Dylan song that goes “I used to care, but things have changed”.

Malaysian students used to care. They used to live up to their grand Malay name “mahasiswa”; fresh, spirited, inspired. Now it is a deafening silence or, worse, clueless silence. We have become frightened and leashed. We have surpassed ourselves to become shining examples of obedience. Like dogs. If the dogs bark, the owners whip and yank on their steel collars. If they are silent, they are rewarded with treats. In time, we have forgotten how to bark.

The mahasiswas of today are like those dogs.

Historically, young people were a significant force in the development of this country.

They were heady with the victory for independence. The mahasiswas debated, protested and demonstrated for pro-justice, pro-human rights, justifying their position and manifesting the education they receive in the best institutions of the country.

Back in 1974 during the Tasik Utara issue they were reckoned forceful enough that desperate villagers look towards them to help. Twenty-six years ago, a staggering 5,000 students went to demand for the eradication of poverty in Baling.

Where are they now?

In Pavilion, sipping RM15 cappucino lattes, using a Blackberry to play “Texas Hold ‘Em”. In shopping malls, stretching daddy’s credit card to buy more things they don’t need to impress people they don’t like. Apathy, ignorance, oblivion is a pandemic amongst Malaysian youths. One can give the excuse that the mahasiswas of before were spurred by the injustice they saw when they worked as teachers in the outskirts. One can continue by saying it is not our fault that we are robbed of such experience and enlightenment. One can even cite the magic word: Akta Universiti and Kolej Universiti. Such an argument is nothing but a conscience struggling to save some face.

First-class facilities did not rob the students at the University of California, Berkeley and several other universities of their conscience. For months, theirs was a persistent effort to bring together students of all race, gender and opinions to pass a Bill to divest from any investment from companies that provided financial and military support to Israel. Compared to them, we fall short miserably in terms of empowerment, independence and desire.

Sure, AUKU is a reasonable excuse. Being expelled and blacklisted, the possibility of not graduating, not getting a job or, worst of all, the dreams of owning a BMW evaporated are deterrents. However, AUKU is a blatant disregard to Article 10 of the Federal Constitution which advocates freedom of speech, expression and assembly, an insult to Article 9 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and has successfully played a part to place us at the lowest tier in terms of human rights. We proudly proclaim ourselves university students, in complete awareness of this knowledge, yet though our inaction we blindly accept this insolent law.

Aminul Rasyid, Teoh Beng Hock, Kugan, GST, subsidy cuts, economic burden on the rakyat are only a sliver of the issues insulting basic human rights. An innocent kid shot directly to the head by an irresponsible police officer. Economic terrorism leading to families not even able to have basic amenities such as water, electricity and education. We see, hear and know of all these injustices. Our awareness, if there is at all any, makes our silence all the more embarrassing when compared with our student bodies of 30 years ago, the outspoken student crowds of our neighbouring country, Indonesia, and America’s student unions divestment effort to stop Israel’s crimes towards Palestine.

Have those RM15 cappucino lattes completely numbed our conscience?

Thankfully, all is not lost. There are a few, but not enough, out there who publicly denounce AUKU and have courageously listened to their hearts and conscience, such as the recent famous four from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia caught participating in the Hulu Selangor by-election. To these brave young men and women, I salute you.

Building a better person

2010-05-03T16:11:00.002+08:00

We often think about schooling as simply getting good exam results; maybe at best, we regard it as a way to practice our intellectual skills. But schools are where the adults of tomorrow learn not just how to read and write, but how to live. Our schools do a good job of teaching us basic literacy (and arguably quite a poor job of helping us think about the things we read and write), but even our best schools are often only mediocre when it comes to preparing us for life outside academia.

A friend of mine, Lim Su Ann, wrote an excellent post some months back on how deeply unsatisfying the opportunities for extracurricular growth are in our schools — it's a piece I recommend highly. Most of us in school simply go through the motions of extracurricular involvement — we don't really care about what we do. Most of the extracurricular things I pursued in school had nothing to do with my school. Until our schools allow students the freedom to pursue the things which interest them outside the classroom, and encourage responsible decisionmaking instead of simply usurping all of students' autonomy, we can't say our schools are properly preparing the adults of tomorrow.

The right way to study maths

2010-04-19T09:47:00.002+08:00

Here is a fantastic presentation by a maths teacher, Dan Meyer, explaining what is wrong with virtually every maths textbook out there:

What I like about his idea is that it focuses on first understanding the concept, and only then applying the maths. It harnesses your intuition about a problem you would normally encounter in the real world to get you on the hook, so you have no choice but to learn the maths to get your answer.

He speaks as if this is a problem unique to the US, but it is not. As he says, teachers from all around the world have approached him about his ideas, because they resonate on a global basis. Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman has a famous essay on the irrelevance of mathematics textbooks in a similar vein.

Notice that Meyer identifies five symptoms of bad maths teaching. I think all of us in our school system have suffered from these symptoms at some point; the aversion to word problems and the over-eagerness to harness a simple formula must ring a bell for anyone who's ever stepped into a classroom here. Now the question is, how can we bring this new philosophy of teaching into our classrooms and textbooks?

Personal Milestone (I)

2010-04-02T10:08:00.006+08:00

It's been a while since my last post on this blog. I've been buried in my dissertation for the past six months. Thus the neglect of my blogging duties. It's been a long journey, one that has been physically, intellectually and emotionally challenging (and oftentimes exhausting) but after approximately 6 years here at Duke, I successfully defended my dissertation on Wednesday, March 31st, 2010! Later, I'll write a lengthier post on the process of obtaining my PhD but for now, I'm enjoying the feeling of having the PhD monkey off my back!

Budget Cuts Eats In

2010-02-04T13:23:00.002+08:00

In my "political life", one of my key themes is the fact that the Government is out of cash, and is desperately trying to raise funds via various forms of taxes, as well as sales of assets. However, the clearest indication of the shortfall of funds has to be the ridiculous nature of some of the budget tightening process at our Ministries.

It raises the question as to whether the Government knows what it is doing and whether it is just being penny wise and pound foolish. Officials appear to be concentrating on minor cost cuts eating into essential expenditure, instead of the big ticket items which are often wasteful, and are the real culprits to wasteful expenditure.

The opinion by former chief news editor of NTV7 and 8TV with regards to the cuts in our local boarding schools highlights the ridiculousness of the situation. Excerpts of his article are as follows.

Of schools, hostels and tight budget

...After the few early callers, a lady who was put on air. But instead of commenting on the topic she went on to say that her children who were studying in a boarding school have been told to go home every weekend. Reason being, the school (which she did not name) could no longer provide meals for the students during weekends.

Apparently, the days of giving hostel students meals seven days a week are gone. Why? Well the lady claimed she was told that the school’s annual budget had been slashed. Meaning the school is running on less money.

[...]

But it did not stop there. Several calls later, another listener called in to say that at the hostel his son was staying, students now had to do group study sessions in the canteen. They used to study in classrooms but not anymore. The lights in the classrooms are now switched off. Reason? Apparently to save on electricity bills, i.e., cut costs, i.e., austerity drive.

[...]

Over the weekend I bumped into an acquaintance who happened to be a hostel warden. He is a school teacher but, as warden, he is additionally tasked with looking after the well-being and security of students staying in his school’s hostel.

I asked him if it was true that students are now required to go home on weekends.

“Yes,” he said. Initially, all students were instructed to leave for home on weekends, he added, but the ministry then decided the go-home move could not be made mandatory. So students are “advised’ to go home on weekends. Most students do so, he said. Wonder why?

“Why this ‘nasihat’?” I asked. Why has it come to this?

“No money” was his reply. Well, not exactly “no money” but, rather, limited funds. Put simply schools are operating on tight budget.

[...]

Parents, coaches, teachers, students – many people are angry. Rightly so. The consequences of the budget cut are dire and many. We all know it, all too well. There’s no need to repeat ourselves. Suffice for me to ask again: “How come?” Why no money?

Then, there’s the 2008 Auditor General’s report highlighted by The Malay Mail recently. The AG report said the Education Ministry paid RM250 for each of six peacock flowers for a school. The market price for the plant is RM30.

The report went on to reveal the ministry had spent RM57,493 for the supply, sowing, gardening and maintenance of flowers and trees for the same school – 880 per cent higher than the most expensive quote available from local nurseries.

And it was reported also that the ministry had replaced doors in two schools at prices 56 per cent to 64 per cent higher than figures quoted by the Works Ministry.

Then there was the RM480 paid for a door when the Works Ministry quoted RM272.70.

There are more examples, of course. But enough said, lest our hearts ache further.

But I ask – why the big spending? How come there’s money to spend?

[...]

The tragic tale of Malaysian education

2010-02-03T22:46:00.002+08:00

by Lee Wei Lian

(This article is first published in The Malaysian Insider)

What do Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, Malaysia’s founding father Tunku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s second richest man T. Ananda Krishnan and YTL chairman Tan Sri Francis Yeoh have in common?

The answer: all four studied at once famous schools that are now glaringly absent from the list of 20 high performance schools recently announced by the government.

Victoria Institution (Ananda, Yeoh), St John’s Institution (Najib), Penang Free School (Tunku Abdul Rahman) and others like Malacca High School and St Michael’s Institution are all storied schools that have been allowed to fall behind until they are no longer counted as among the elite educational institutions in the country.

Just imagine if Eton College in the UK or Raffles Institution in Singapore was not recognised as one of the top schools in their respective countries.

That is the equivalent of what has befallen what were once the most respected schools in Malaysia. Today, they do not even rate a mention on a list of the top 20 high performance schools.

It is a crying shame as these schools produced many leaders that were influential in the development of Malaysia and to a lesser extent even in Singapore.

But what happened to these academic icons? Was it merely a case of these venerable institutions being surpassed by more ambitious upstarts? Was it merely oversight that they were left off the list? Or was it a result of deliberate attempts over the years to sideline these institutions because they were founded by the British and/or missionaries?

Or was it sheer mismanagement on the part of the government that these once most prestigious names in Malayan/Malaysian education were allowed to fade along with the general perception of the quality of education in the country? Did, like so much else that is wrong with Malaysia, politics get in the way of academic stewardship?

Just consider the contributions these schools have made to society and business. Besides Tunku, the Penang Free School also nurtured the likes of Tan Sri P. Ramlee, actor and director extraordinaire, Danny Quah, a prominent economist and head of the department of economics at the London School of Economics who also sits on the National Economic Advisory Council which is formulating Malaysia’s new economic model, and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Assistant Secretary-General for Economic Development in the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs.

Apart from the prime minister, St John’s groomed one of Asia’s top bankers, CIMB CEO Datuk Seri Nazir Razak, one of the world’s top central bankers Tan Sri Dr Zeti Akhtar Aziz and the former vice-chancellor of the National University of Singapore, B.R. Sreenivasan.

Methodist Boy’s School produced the chairman of the Genting group, Tan Sri Lim Kok Thay, the chairman of the OCBC Bank and former CEO of Singapore Airlines, Dr Cheong Choong Kong, the vice chancellor of UKM, Professor Tan Sri Dr Sharifah Hapsah Syed Hasan Shahabudin, Tan Sri Tay Ah Lek, managing director of Public Bank, and Singapore’s former Minister of Education Ong Bang Poon.

Besides Ananda and Yeoh, Victoria Institution also educated the one of the world’s richest men, the Sultan of Brunei, Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, former Singapore Deputy Prime Minister S. Rajaratnam, as well as some of Malaysia’s most legendary sportsmen, footballer Mokhtar Dahari and all four Sidek brothers.

Even if there was no list of top 20 “high performance schools” there would be little disagreement that these schools are now just a shadow of their former selves and can no longer command the respect they once did.

What does it then say about a government that allowed such historic and educational gems, some that date back nearly 200 years, to slip down the ranks in less than 50?

A closer look at the list also reveals something of the government’s apparently negligent attitude towards heritage conservation. Seri Bintang Utara made it to the list as a high performance school despite having to survive the demolition of its premises in Jalan Bukit Bintang, Kuala Lumpur where the “ginormous” Pavilion mall now stands and what appears to be attempts to wipe out its identity as it was formerly known as the Bukit Bintang Girls School, or more popularly BBGS.

To this day, while I like and enjoy the high quality of the Pavilion mall, I still feel a wave of disgust every time I set foot in it that seemingly nothing of BBGS, Kuala Lumpur’s oldest and one of its most prestigious schools, was preserved in the construction of the mall and that the government did not see fit to mandate any preservation either.

And all this is more than an academic shame as these schools are reminders of a time when students of all races grew up in school together and were taught to discard their racial lenses and be Johannians and Victorians, a truly depressing contrast to the current situation where Malays grow up in national schools, Chinese in Chinese schools and Indians in Tamil schools.

Can the Najib administration reverse the decline of these once prestigious schools? Anything can be achieved if there is sufficient will so the bigger question is, do they even want to?

* Lee Wei Lian attended the Bukit Bintang Boys School in Petaling Jaya. Nisi Dominus Frustra.

Addendum: The list of Malaysia’s 20 high performance schools are: Sekolah Tun Fatimah (Johor Baru), Sekolah Dato’ Abdul Razak (Seremban), Malay College Kuala Kangsar, Sekolah Seri Puteri (Cyberjaya), Sekolah Menengah Sultan Abdul Halim (Jitra), Kolej Tunku Kurshiah (Seremban), Kolej Islam Sultan Alam Shah (Klang), Sekolah Menengah Sains (SMS) Tuanku Syed Putra (Perlis), Sekolah Sultan Alam Shah (Putrajaya) and SMS Muzaffar Syah (Malacca), Sekolah Menengah Kebangsaan (SMK) (P) Sri Aman(Petaling Jaya), SMK Aminuddin Baki (Kuala Lumpur), SMK Sultanah Asma (Alor Star) and SMK (P) St George (Penang), Sekolah Kebangsaan (SK) Seri Bintang Utara (KL), SK Taman Tun Dr Ismail 1 (KL), SK Bukit Damansara (KL), SK Zainab (2) (Kota Baru), SK Convent Kota (Taiping), SK Bandar Baru Uda 2 (Johor Baru).

Elections in schools?

2010-01-13T06:42:00.000+08:00

Apparently the Election Commission has been running elections in schools. There are two problems with this piece of news: the first is the skepticism about the value of teaching democracy, and the second is that the Election Commission is involved at all.

Basically, a primary school in Taman Tun (a suburb of KL) held an election for the post of head prefect -- supposedly the first time this has happened in the country. They had a formal nomination and campaigning process, all conducted by the Election Commission.

When contacted, the EC deputy chair said he believed that teaching democracy to primary school students is unnecessary, but that the Federal Territories EC was just doing its job in helping conduct the elections. I can't really imagine why he would say this.

The job of the Election Commission, after all, is to safeguard our democracy! Why on earth would they oppose the teaching of democracy or democratic values? What does the EC have against democracy or elections?

The excuse that year 4 or year 6 kids are too young to understand how the democratic process works is ridiculous. Even in year 1, we were electing class monitors. If you're old enough to buy something from your school canteen, you're old enough to make at least some decisions for yourself -- and I see no reason to exclude political decisions from this. If you're old enough to learn how to spend money, you're old enough to learn how to decide who to vote for.

Of course, we can debate whether the position of head prefect should be an elected one -- but assuming the candidates are drawn from the body of prefects, all of whom have already met minimum standards of discipline and responsibility, I can easily see why it may make sense to elect the head prefect.

What I can't see is why the EC should be involved in this. If the teachers' understanding of elections and democracy is so poor that they don't know where to start with holding an election, then that is a serious failure of both democracy and public education. It does not make logical sense for the same public agency to be holding both parliamentary and primary school student government elections.

Overall, I'm hopeful that we can expand civics education in our schools and see more applied lessons in democracy like this one. While it's debatable whether how this election was held was actually instructive, I think in general, schools ought to be a fantastic environment for learning how our country's political system works, and what our democratic values look like when put into practice.

A Student's Perspective on Semesters for Form 6

2009-12-02T12:51:00.002+08:00

One of my friends, Rajan Rishyakaran, has written a response to the lower six student's letter which Tony recently posted. Rajan, himself an alumnus of form six, said most of what I want to say about the issue, and I recommend reading it—this is perhaps the most incisive part of the piece:

If the Ministry of Education really wanted to move to a semester-based, coursework-heavy system, the better policy is to increase enrolment of non-Bumiputras in matriculation programs (though matriculation and Form Six are under different ministries). The cynic in me points out that would defeat the purpose of the dual-track system in Malaysia: as a tool of stealthish discrimination.

I want to tackle something else instead: the issue of time management.

As Rajan says himself, a lot of the people criticising the writer for their ostensible lousy time management probably didn't do STPM. I didn't do it either, but everything I know about it suggests that it is absolutely not a walk in the park.

In the first place, how does the school environment the writer describes train you to manage your time better? The writer is in school from 7.30am to 4pm, which is longer than the typical 9-to-5 workday. Even assuming most Malaysians work longer hours than that, it is unusual for people to bring work home with them and work at home.

Because our schools are so inferior, a lot of Malaysians now attend tuition classes outside school. Most lower six students will have even less time to attend tuition now. And even assuming there isn't tuition, most students will be studying in their spare time, especially for an exam like the STPM.

If you work it out, students operating under this new scheme will have basically little to no free time. What time is there to manage then, if you have to devote all of it to your studies?

A lot of the issues the writer mentions don't exist for pre-university students in other streams, because you tend to get a choice of what (if any) extracurricular activities to participate in, and have more spare time during the day. That's where time management is actually relevant.

Now, the writer obviously is rolling out a laundry list of problems with the school that to other people probably seem a bit ludicrous. Complaints about skin cancer and mamak food are relatively trivial compared to the other points the writer raises. But as Tony said, he or she is a 17-year-old, and in my experience, these complaints are almost ubiquitous amongst students of this age in school. Let's not focus on the trivialities of the writer's complaint: the real issue is that the Education Ministry is rolling out a poorly-thought-out plan, using the entire nation as its guinea pig — and on the face of it, the idea is ridiculous, because it means students are in school for longer than many adult workers.

New "Semester" Scheme For Form 6?

2009-11-20T09:59:00.004+08:00

I've received the following complaint from a Form 6 student. I don't agree with the bits which said some of the activities are a "waste of time", but the concern over long school hours is very valid. When commenting, please remember that the writer is a 17-year-old.

I am a lower 6 student. A new system has recently been implemented in all schools with Form Six classes throughout the country. All Lower Six classes from 2009 will have to stay back until 4pm. This new system started in my school in early July.
I found out from the teachers that this batch (2009/2010) was used to try out the suitability of the semester-based system to be implemented in schools in the future. Unfortunately for us, our exams are still not semester-based.

Staying back till 4pm means we, Lower Six students will not have a chance to participate in the extra-curricular activities as all the club and uniformed body meetings are held after 1pm. What about our co-curriculum marks? We were told that 10% of the overall criteria to enter local universities is from our involvement in co-curricular activities.

Before this new system was implemented, we all could go for our co-curricular activities. With the new system in place, we are forced to stay back and could not involve ourself in such activities as the timing will clash with us as most activities are held after school. While co-curricular activities make up 10% of our total STPM grades, I strongly believe there must be other alternatives. I don’t think a person who has four distinctions, but without any co-curricular achievements will be selected to enter a local university.

So, why should we stay until 4 o’clock seen that such things we are doing now are no contribute any marks to our STPM?

The new system is a complete waste of time. The new system requires students to stay back after school until 4pm for activities. But the activities organised by the school to keep students until 4pm is not a good idea. The extra time that we are required to put in in school is used for nonsensical activities such as making posters, doing sketches, preparing for presentations and proposals and doing research and development (R&D).

Besides this , some activities are really of no use to us. For example, during cocuriculum , we even told to prepare food, play on the field under the hot sun from 2.40pm - 4pm and planning how to decorate this school. I do not see the teaching and learning value here as these activities are a waste of time! In addition, some students hate it so much that they decided to skip school altogether.

I understand that this system is a part of the Education Ministry’s initiative in boosting the level of confidence and enhancing communicative ability among school students while doing presentation. But please be rational and reasonable. Ministry need to take cognizance that we are humans too. All of us need more time to study and staying back till 4pm is just too much on our plates. The moment we reach home, most of us will be dead tired. By the time we get home, we will be exhausted because we have been in school since 7.30am. Many of us would be too tired after coming back from school and just hop on to the bed into dreamland even if they wish to study.

Furthermore, not to forget the amount of assignments given by our teachers and we have to complete everything on time. By then we would be too tired to study. Preparing for presentations and projects requires a lot of our attention and time, so we will struggle to cope with our studies. Our main priority is still our studies! Without time to revise, how are we supposed to live our dreams of attaining a 4.0 score?

But forcing us to stay back after school will deprive us of the chance to revise our lessons. An ample amount of time is needed for us to carry out constant revision. However with the time constraints, there is certainly no time for us to study at home! Even if we do have the time, we would suffer from fatigue. The ministry fails to see the light that whatever there doing is in fact making our lives even more miserable, stressful and very depressing. Will this result in good achievement in the STPM exams? Definitely NO!!!

Many parents decided to send their children to Form Six as it is the cheapest route to universities. But now not any more. We have to fork out our own money for our lunch expenses. By right, if the Education Ministry wants to carry this out, they should at least think about giving lunch allowances to us. Now, parents will need to fork out additional expenses for their child’s lunch. Not everyone is well-to-do. In these times where money does not come easy, forking out extra money will be a burden to them as the overall house expenditure would have increased as well.

Another woe is that we are only given an hour for our lunch break before we begin our presentation; it is impossible for students to head home to have a home-cooked meal, take a bath and have a short break and then rush back to school before 2 o’clock. Most of us will not be able to eat at home as we are not living nearby. Therefore, students are left with no other alternatives but to patronise nearby mamak stalls for their lunch. Needless to say, food sold at mamak stalls can be unhealthy and unhygienic. And since the mamak stalls usually serves oily and non-nutritious food, the students are not benefiting at all as it make us feel lethargic. With the lack of nutritious food, how are we to maintain a healthy body to study hard and achieve good result in STPM?

On the other hand, transportation is a major problem for most of us. Our parents are not free to send us home. Left with no other immediate solutions in sight, we have to rely on public transport like buses. Taking the school bus at odd hours costs extra as it is inconvenient for the drivers. Some of us are not living nearby and thus, walking back home will be out of the question and too dangerous for us students considering the disturbingly high number of snatch theft cases across the country.

Besides that, prolonged exposure to the afternoon sun could lead to skin cancer. Do we want to wait till years later to find out that many of our future generation who took Form Six were to suffer from skin cancer because of this new system? It is undeniable that life in the sixth form can be pretty daunting and challenging.

Not only are the students disatisfied with this new system, the teachers are unhappy. They could not express their feeling as they could risk losing their jobs. Almost every teacher I have spoken to, too, did not agree with this new system.They feel that the time spent in school is way too long! Forget about the students, even the teachers are grumbling! Teachers and students alike are exhausted by the end of the day.So, how do we expect teachers to perform their best when they are tired? Needless to say, students too have a hard time concentrating in the hot and stuffy afternoon classes.It is not fair for the teachers who teach the Form Six classes for they have to stay back for longer hours compared to their other colleagues. Wake up! The new system brings nothing but stress and red tape.

I acknowledged that some authorities would advice us to quit form six if we despise or hate the system. However, as far as I concerned, we are totally not being informed about this 4pm-stay-back system until a few week after we enrolled. We are the victims and we got no other better options than form six but as a student, we have the right to protect our right and express our feeling. The system will continue to be part of our lives for next years. So, we need to change. There is no point “testing” as the Malaysian education system is not a playground or lab where future leaders were “tested” with new policies. We as the students are not “guinea pigs”. If we were to continue to “test” policies on our children, our education system will be seen as a joke in the international arena.

Last but not least, I only hope next year we can revert back to the old system where everyone can go home like normal or 1pm. I sincerely hope you will help us. Thank you.

Bogus PhDs No More?

2009-11-12T18:29:00.004+08:00

I took the opportunity to ask the Minister of Higher Education as to the steps being taken to prevent academics with dubious qualifications from being hired by our local universities during the Budget debate 2 days ago. The following was the relevant exchange:

Tuan Pua Kiam Wee [Petaling Jaya Utara]: Yang Berhormat Menteri, penjelasan. Minta maaf, topik tadi berkenaan mengenai PhD yang diambil oleh universiti-universiti tempatan. Saya ingin tahu, kita memang perlu meningkatkan jumlah pemegang PhD dalam universiti kita, tetapi saya mendapati bahawa memang ada juga yang pemegang PhD itu tidak mempunyai PhD dari universiti yang dikatakan sebagai recognized iaitu ada pemegang PhD di dalam universiti kita dan saya ada nama di mana mereka mendapat PhD mereka melalui correspondence course.

Pihak yang mengambil PhD memang tidak ada PhD yang credible boleh didapat di
correspondence course. So, apakah langkah yang diambil oleh kementerian supaya pemegang PhD seperti ini tidak dilantik dalam universiti kita.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Pertamanya kementerian sedang dalam peringkat untuk memperketatkan lagi peruntukan yang ada dalam undang-undang khususnya
undang-undang Akta Institut Pengajian Tinggi Swasta (Akta 555) untuk tentukan kita berkuasa untuk mengambil tindakan terhadap kes-kes yang sedemikian. Keduanya seperti kata Yang Berhormat ada tenaga akademik yang mungkin mempunyai PhD yang sedemikian tetapi kehadiran mereka dalam IPT atau pun universiti mereka masing-masing mungkin berasaskan Ijazah yang lain sama ada masters dan sebagainya.

Oleh kerana sesuatu PhD itu tidak diiktiraf, ia tidak di ambil kira. Saya percaya kalau pun ada nama dan saya juga mengalu-alukan kalau nama itu dapat diberi, kita boleh menyiasat dengan lebih teliti mengenai kedudukan pensyarah yang sebegini. Akan tetapi daripada laporan yang saya dimaklumkan, kalau pun ada pensyarah yang memiliki ijazah dan juga sarjana dan sebagainya, mereka juga membuat dan mendapat PhD mungkin melalui correspondence sebahagian daripada khususnya universiti awam, kalau PhD itu tidak diiktiraf, memang ia tidak diiktiraf dan mereka tidak mendapat apa-apa tambahan atau kebaikan daripada kedudukan mereka sebagai anggota tenaga akademik.

Tuan Pua Kiam Wee [Petaling Jaya Utara]: Akan tetapi dalam resume mereka, dalam laman web, semua letak Doktor. So ini agak mengelirukan dan tidak baik untuk penuntut kita di universiti juga. Terima kasih.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Saya akan memberi nasihat dan makluman kepada semua dalam kes yang mana boleh guna profesor, boleh mengguna nama Doktor dan
sebagainya. Jika Yang Berhormat boleh bekerjasama dengan kementerian memberikan saya
nama-nama itu, kita akan follow up dengan pihak universiti dan kerana kita tidak kompromi dalam soal-soal yang boleh menyentuh kesan penjanaan tenaga akademik dalam universiti kita.

Minister's Reply on Action Against Students at UM

2009-11-12T11:59:00.008+08:00

The issue of students being called up by the Disciplinary Board of various universities for offences such as inviting prominent politicians to be judges at a debating competition was raised during the recent budget debate, and the Minister of Higher Education 2 days ago.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nor: Untuk makluman Ahli Yang Berhormat di bawah aspek perundangan, Akta Universiti dan Kolej Universiti (AUKU) yang dikuatkuasakan pada 1 Februari 2009 telah membuat perubahan besar kepada sistem tadbir urus, kebajikan pekerja, dan juga hak pelajar universiti merangkumi juga kebebasan akademik.

AUKU sebenarnya tidak menyekat kebebasan berfikir dan kreativiti tenaga akademik dan pelajar universiti. Malahan mereka diberikan kebebasan untuk melahirkan pandangan, pendapat, cadangan dan sebagainya Akan tetapi mesti mengikut saluran-saluran tertentu demi mewujudkan suasana kondusif dan sihat dalam melaksanakan aktiviti pembelajaran dan pengajaran yang berkualiti.

Berkenaan dengan tindakan Universiti Malaya membawa lapan orang pelajar ke prosiding tatatertib. Untuk makluman Ahli Yang Berhormat yang telah mengemukakan mengenai perkara ini iaitu Yang Berhormat Padang Terap dan juga Yang Berhormat Serdang, tindakan yang diambil oleh pengurusan Universiti Malaya merupakan prosedur biasa bagi mendapatkan maklumat di atas beberapa tindakan pelajar tersebut.

Ini adalah disebabkan oleh tindakan mereka yang menjemput VIP di dalam majlis mereka tanpa mendapatkan kelulusan pihak pengurusan universiti. Kementerian akan sentiasa memantau secara dekat setiap kes yang berlaku di IPT. Namun berkeyakinan kes ini akan dapat diselesaikan oleh pengurusan Universiti Malaya dengan baik berdasarkan peruntukan perundangan dan peraturan sedia ada.

Puan Teo Nie Ching [Serdang]: Minta penjelasan. Terima kasih Tuan Yang di-Pertua. Terima kasih Yang Berhormat Menteri. Saya hendak bertanya sedikit. Sekiranya prosiding tatatertib ini adalah satu prosiding yang biasa untuk mendapatkan maklumat daripada kelapan-lapan pelajar ini. Jadi soalan saya, kenapakah prosiding ini ditangguhkan sebanyak dua kali?

Sekiranya memangl pihak universiti mereka hendak mendapatkan maklumat, informasi daripada pelajar-pelajar ini, prosiding ini boleh diteruskan. Akan tetapi nampaknya hari ini mereka memanggil pelajar-pelajar untuk datang menghadirkan diri dalam prosiding tetapi selepas pelajar-pelajar itu menunggu sehingga dua jam, prosiding ini ditangguhkan.

Ini bukan berlaku kali pertama, ini berlaku sebanyak dua kali. Jadi saya hendak meminta penjelasan daripada Menteri, adakah ini satu cara sebagai sesuatu penyeksaan mental kepada pelajar-pelajar ini. dan saya mengharapkan bahawa pihak universiti mestil lebih profesional dalam mengendalikan peristiwa seperti ini.

[...]

Tuan Pua Kiam Wee [Petaling Jaya Utara]: Tan Sri Yang di-Pertua, soalan saya senang sahaja. Penambahan ke atas apa yang telah disebutkan oleh Yang Berhormat Serdang. Saya ingin hendak bertanya Lembaga Tatatertib, kerjanya adakah mengadakan satu hearing untuk mendapatkan maklumat? Saya rasa itu agak ekstrem. Hendak mendapatkan maklumat, panggil sahaja penuntut-penuntut tersebut, datang ke bilik dan jelaskan. Tidak perlu panggil satu hearing tatatertib untuk mendapatkan maklumat. Jadi saya agak yang penjelasan itu seperti tidak berapa elok. [Ketawa] Terima kasih.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin [Pasir Gudang]: Beliau... Tan Sri Yang di-Pertua...

Tuan Mohd. Nasir bin Zakaria [Padang Terap]: Yang Berhormat Menteri. Isu yang sama. Terima kasih Yang Berhormat Menteri, Tuan Yang di-Pertua. Saya membangkitkan isu berkaitan dengan AUKU ini. Kita telah menyatakan kebimbangan kita semasa pindaan dibuat dalam Dewan ini dalam dua sesi yang lepas. Menteri memberikan jaminan kepada kita mengenai dasar kita mengamalkan maklumat bersuara dan sebagainya.

Isunya ialah bagaimana pelajar-pelajar ini atau mahasiswa-mahasiswa ini ingin mendengar pandangan balas yang kedua daripada pihak yang lain untuk memantapkan pemikiran mereka.

Pada masa yang sama kita melihat berlaku ketidakadilan apabila yang datang itu adalah daripada pandangan yang berbeza, maka pelajar-pelajar ini dipanggil untuk berdepan dengan lembaga tatatertib. Pada masa yang sama sehari ataupun dua hari sebelum daripada itu, ada daripada UMNO masuk, daripada parti pemerintah masuk dan tidak ada apa-apa tindakan. Pada masa yang sama tidak silap saya, ketika di tangguh buat kali yang pertama, ia bertepatan dengan lawatan daripada seorang pemimpin politik masuk ke dalam Universiti Malaya dan kemungkinan itu menyebabkan protes untuk hearing itu ditangguhkan. Adakah benar dan bagaimana dengan janji yang dilafazkan dahulu ketika tuan masih lagi sekarang menjadi Menteri Pengajian Tinggi?

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Tuan Yang di-Pertua, terima kasih kepada perkara-perkara yang dibangkitkan. Isu yang timbul mengenai kes kelapan-lapan pelajar ini ialah, walaupun program yang dianjurkan itu diluluskan oleh universiti, tetapi permohonan oleh persatuan pelajar ini tidak menyebut siapa yang mereka hendak jemput dan itu sebenarnya yang menjadi isu kepada kes ini. Ini kerana setelah diluluskan permohonan menganjurkan program itu, maka didapati ...bahawa mereka telah membawa ataupun menjemput VIP yang tidak pun dimaklumkan kepada pihak universiti. Maka atas sebab itulah prosiding ini diadakan oleh pihak universiti untuk mendapat maklumat... ataupun laporan yang lebih lanjut daripada pelajar-pelajar yang sedemikian dan penangguhan prosiding ini saya difahamkan, bahawa oleh kerana buat ketika ini pelajar-pelajar sedang melalui peperiksaan. Maka atas sebab itulah prosiding ini telah ditangguhkan.

Puan Teresa Kok Suh Sim [Seputeh]: Minta penjelasan.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Okey.

Puan Teresa Kok Suh Sim [Seputeh]: Terima kasih Yang Berhormat Menteri. Tadi kes yang dibangkitkan oleh Yang Berhormat Serdang itu, sebenarnya dalam perbahasan itu saya dijemput pergi sana. Saya difahamkan, kerana kehadiran saya di kampus Universiti Malaya itu yang menyebabkan semua pelajar menghadapi masalah. Akan tetapi, saya bukan ahli politik sahaja. Saya pergi sana menjadi seorang hakim untuk perbahasan bekas-bekas debater dahulu dan saya juga bekas graduan Universiti Malaya. Saya dapat Master saya di sana.

Jadi, saya seharusnya diangkat sebagai seorang bekas graduan Universiti Malaya. Kalau ini pun menyebabkan Persatuan Tionghoa itu menghadapi masalah, macam mana kita boleh mengharapkan yang pelajar kita di universiti ini boleh mempunyai minda yang lebih terbuka? Ini kerana universiti memang masih melayan mereka seperti budak kecil, macam kindergarten student. Saya juga hendak tanya yang pindaan UCA, University and Colleges Act itu. Bukankah kita telah pun memberi lebih ruang kepada para pelajar untuk menganjurkan aktiviti, menyertai aktiviti dan sebagainya? Kenapa hanya kerana saya hadir dalam kampus Universiti Malaya, selepas itu persatuan itu menghadapi masalah, pelajar-pelajar semua dipanggil untuk ke disciplinary board?

Jadi, saya hendak minta Menteri boleh tolong merekakah? Kerana saya rasa ini bukan tujuan yang kita hendak shape mindset pelajar kita di universiti. Terima kasih.

Tuan Loke Siew Fook [Rasah]: Terima kasih Tuan Yang di-Pertua. Terima kasih
Menteri. Semasa kita membahaskan pindaan kepada AUKU pada tahun lepas, pihak
kementerian telah memberikan jaminan bahawa pemimpin-pemimpin politik walaupun daripada pembangkang akan dibenarkan untuk masuk ke dalam kampus untuk memberikan ucapan dan sebagainya kalau dipelawa oleh pelajar.

Soalan saya ialah, mungkin saya rasa dalam hal ini pihak kementerian memang tidak
ada masalah untuk memberikan pemimpin-pemimpin pembangkang untuk masuk ke kampus. Adakah dalam hal ini kemungkinan pihak pengurusan universiti yang go against dasar pihak kementerian. Ini kerana saya rasa ini perkara yang remeh-temeh. Hanya menjadi pengadil.

Adakah perlu persatuan pelajar setiap permohonan itu ataupun pelawaan itu harus mendapatkan kelulusan daripada pihak universiti? Saya rasa ini mungkin pihak pengurusan universiti yang telah bertindak di luar dasar yang telah ditetapkan oleh pihak kementerian. Terima kasih.

Puan Teo Nie Ching [Serdang]: Saya hendak tambah sedikit sahaja kerana saya hendak membuat satu pembetulan. Saya difahami daripada pelajar-pelajar, memanglah pihak universiti telah mengeluarkan satu surat kepada mereka yang dalam surat itu syarat-syarat yang dinyatakan adalah bahawa pelajar-pelajar di universiti dan juga orang-orang luar boleh dilibat ataupun melibatkan diri dalam debat pada hari itu.

Jadi saya rasa memanglah itu satu kebenaran dari pihak universiti. Ini kerana dalam
surat itu juga tidak nyata bahawa pelajar-pelajar ini tidak boleh mengajak Yang Berhormat Seputehkah atau ajak siapa-siapa pemimpin-pemimpin parti politik. Jadi saya rasalah alasan yang diberi daripada universiti ini memanglah langsung tidak munasabah dan saya memang harap bahawa Menteri bolehlah campur tangan supaya kita boleh tahu, kita boleh dapat satu jaminan, bahawa selepas peperiksaan pelajar-pelajar ini, mereka juga tidak akan dipecat dan diberi amaran keras kerana saya rasa tindakan mereka adalah langsung tidak ada salah.

Dato’ Seri Mohamed Khaled bin Nordin: Okey, Tuan Yang di-Pertua. Memanglah setiap universiti akan menetapkan prosedur bagaimana soal-soal aktiviti yang dibuat oleh pelajar, oleh persatuan dan sebagainya. Semua persatuan di universiti perlu melalui prosedur yang telah ditetapkan oleh universiti tersebut termasuklah kes yang sedang kita bahaskan pada hari ini.

Sebagaimana yang telah dinyatakan bahawa semua pihak termasuklah pemimpin daripada parti pembangkang boleh dijemput sekiranya sesuatu majlis itu berkisar kepada soal-soal yang ada hubung kait dengan hal-hal akademik... Soal-soal, syarat dan segala perkara yang perlu bagi menjayakan sesuatu aktiviti oleh persatuan ataupun pelajar akan ditentukan oleh pihak universiti mengenai peraturan dan sebagainya. Mana-mana pemimpin parti politik, sememangnya dibenarkan untuk menyertai sekiranya ia melibatkan hal-hal yang ada hubung kait dengan soal-soal akademik.

Akan tetapi dalam kes ini malangnya, tidak dimaklumkan kerana Yang Berhormat yang terlibat adalah merupakan pemimpin bagi sesebuah parti politik sepatutnya saya difahamkan, saya dilaporkan begitu, persatuan pelajar itu memaklumkan siapa yang dia hendak jemput dan sebagainya. Jadi di situ masalahnya timbul, kerana tidak dimaklumkan terlebih awal dan jika universiti tidak mempunyai peraturan sebegitu, maka mungkin universiti berpendapat ia akan hilang kawalan sekiranya kes yang sama berlaku, berulang bukan sahaja oleh persatuan ini, tetapi juga oleh persatuan-persatuan yang lain.

Jadi atas sebab itulah pelajar-pelajar ini telah dipanggil oleh pihak universiti untuk menentukan mengapa perkara yang sedemikian boleh berlaku dan kita tunggu apa keputusan yang akan dibuat oleh pihak universiti dan seperti yang telah saya nyatakan kementerian akan sentiasa memantau secara dekat kes-kes yang berlaku di IPT seperti ini.

Namun, kita yakin kes ini akan dapat diselesaikan oleh pengurusan universiti termasuk UM dalam kes ini dengan baik berdasarkan peruntukkan perundangan, peraturan dan juga semangat AUKU yang telah pun kita pinda. Jadi, saya percaya setakat itu yang hendak saya nyatakan mengenai kes ini dan penangguhan kes ini adalah kerana pelajar-pelajar sedang menghadapi peperiksaan buat ketika ini.

Doing due diligence: finding educational opportunities

2009-11-07T09:57:00.003+08:00

The case of Anucia, which Tony blogged about last month, seems to have struck a chord with you all: there are over 60 comments and counting on the post. Many are critical of Anucia's failure to research the government's requirements for a teaching post. A lot of people seem to have missed the critical point: if we want better teachers, we need to recognise more good universities. That's basically it -- as for what Anucia should do in her personal situation, the answer is fairly obvious: look for a private sector job, be it here or overseas. But what I want to draw more attention to is the important issue of information when it comes to education; there is an immense knowledge gap which often makes a huge difference in where people end up, and not enough people seem to have this in mind.

My father comes from a rural New Village. The fact that he has a PhD from a prestigious foreign university is almost a fluke. He was fortunate that my grandparents earned enough to put him through university overseas; he tried to apply for a government scholarship, but received what he thought was a rejection letter. Looking back, he realises now that he could have gotten a scholarship if he'd tried harder -- and if not for my grandparents' good fortune and hard work, he might not have gone overseas at all.

Tony and Kian Ming both went to Singapore for secondary school -- like many other middle- to upper-class Malaysian students, they escaped our rapidly-deteriorating public school system. But not many Malaysians know about these kinds of opportunities -- I was only vaguely aware of them when I was in school, and I am in a solidly upper-middle-class area. A lot of times, the question of who gets what opportunities is pretty much up to the roll of the dice, because so many people are not in a position to know what opportunities are out there.

In my part of Petaling Jaya, many students from SMK Damansara Jaya and Damansara Utama go on to attend one of the prestigious United World Colleges for pre-university. Are the students at DJ and DU particularly smarter than their peers elsewhere? Not particularly -- it just happens that a few DJ and DU alumni found out about the UWCs, applied there, got in, and then told their juniors about the opportunity. I never even heard of the UWCs until I went to university.

One of my friends, who is now working, applied on a whim to Bates College -- one of the best liberal arts colleges in the US -- because one of her best friends applied there. He applied there because many of his family members went there. Because she applied, her friends applied as well. For several years, the Malaysian population at Bates was almost entirely comprised of this motley crew. There's no particular reason that this should have been the case, except for simple information asymmetry.

If all Malaysians knew about the UWCs, or about American liberal arts colleges, the situation would be quite different, I am certain. But nobody really seems aware of just how important awareness is. Knowing is easily half the battle here -- you can't apply to Harvard if you've never heard of it. You can't get financial aid from a liberal arts college if you don't even know what financial aid is.

One commenter on Tony's post wrote: "I feel that being young (a subjective measure of age) and having parents that are not well-educated (as you have assumed) are not valid factors that contribute to [Anucia's] predicament now." This is flat-out wrong. If Anucia were older when she applied to do her degree, and if she had come from a more educated family background, she would have more information about how the education system works and what sort of opportunities are out there. That's about as straightforward as you can get.

People in urban areas and from upper-income backgrounds often underestimate how much luck can play a role in securing a good education. People from rural areas and from poor backgrounds simply do not have the educational resources or practical experience to make the right decisions, and this is a major reason why so many Malaysians do not get as good an education as they could have. Blame them for their predicaments all you want -- that will not solve the problem.

Action taken against PMIUM and UM students

2009-10-15T03:23:00.002+08:00

This is really sad. Another reason why the UUCA should be revised. These students were not taking part in political activities. They merely invited politicians, some of whom happened to be from the opposition party, to some of their events. Sadly, the provisions of the amended UUCA probably can be interpreted in such a way as to make a case for these students to be punished.

Wants to Teach, but Degree not Recognised

2009-10-12T11:53:00.005+08:00

The following is a letter I've received from Anucia with regards to the recognition of diplomas and degrees from some of overseas universities.

I am a student almost completing the Graduate Diploma in Education in the University of Western Australia and have been very much looking forward to serving the country. I completed my undergraduate Science degree in USM Penang and opted for an internationally recognised teaching qualification for security purposes. Before I go any further, I would like to apologise if this piece comes across as emotionally driven.

I recently applied online on the Ministry of Education’s website for the Guru Sandaran Terlatih position and have been regularly checking the site for updates since getting through to a person I could speak to about my circumstances has proved to be very hard.

I managed to speak to an officer from the ministry last week and he informed me that the route to a permanent post is via the same route, ie initial probationary period subject to confirmation, and that it was the same for teaching students from public and private colleges. He however could not offer me more information and suggested I call back at another time. Today I spoke to someone else in the office about the process and she told me that I would need my qualifications recognised by JPA before I could be granted an interview and she did not know what should be done after obtaining the JPA recognition.

Anyway, I duly called JPA and was curtly told that my qualifications are not recognised, never mind that it is internationally recognised. I was too distraught to proceed with further questions like where do I go from here, etc. I do not mean to sound pompous, but my practical reports and academic results have been outstanding and I have even been offered a teaching position overseas. I however declined because I wanted to come home to serve my country. To be presented with such news is disappointing and shocking among other things. I guess I can still apply to local private schools but my desire is to make a positive difference in the public education system – a system that I am proudly a product of.

Now I need to figure out what to tell my parents who have funded this course with their life savings. I know I will be faulted for not finding this out before enrolling but really, who would have thought that an internationally recognised qualification is not recognised in Malaysia. Which part of 'international' does Malaysia not fall under? Needless to say I am disillusioned and extremely disappointed that my qualifications and big dreams have no place in Malaysia. Do we even need to wonder why young people are forced out of their own country?

What next? I really don’t know.

Anucia Chacko

UM rises in the Times rankings

2009-10-08T08:44:00.002+08:00

As my co-bloggers often take pains to point out, rankings are far from everything. But still, rankings are something, so here are the top 200 universities in the world, as ranked by the Times Higher Education Supplement. UM has reentered the top 200, a welcome development. The Vice-Chancellor is targeting further improvement.

PTPTN Loan Defaulters beware!

2009-10-01T21:11:00.001+08:00

Warning from the Deputy Higher Education Minister.

UiTM student on the BBC

2009-09-24T02:59:00.003+08:00

I'm not asking this question rhetorically. Is it possible for a university that restricts its student to intake to members of one community be compatible with the ideals and even a definition of a university? Can such a university aspire to be a 'world-class' university? Will opening 10% of places in such a university to students of other races change the underlying structure and founding philosophy of such a university? In many ways, I don't blame this UiTM student leader featured in this BBC video for speaking his views. My sense is that he is a produce of the environment in which he is studying in (perhaps aided by his VC who is a regular BTN speaker). But it is a sad indictment on what some students in Malaysia think universities are for - an instrument of social policy rather than a place for expanding one's mind and learning new ideas.

Foreigners flocking to Asian universities?

2009-09-21T22:15:00.001+08:00

HELP was one of the universities featured in this NY Times article.

HK PhD Fellowship Scheme

2009-09-18T22:50:00.001+08:00

Those interested in doing a PhD in Hong Kong should check out this fellowship. Looks like a pretty attractive offer.

How much of the achievement gap is in our heads?

2009-09-14T03:05:00.002+08:00

The overwhelming perception in Malaysia is that Chinese schools outperform national schools, and that Chinese students outperform others. This isn't something we (by which I mean Malaysians) like to talk about, but reading this report on a study of self-esteem and stereotyping in America, I couldn't help but think of the situation here.

Problematically, I think these perceptions of Chinese superiority have some basis. Maybe Petaling Jaya is an outlier, but amongst the primary schools, Chinese schools generally do better when going head to head with national schools. Over 90% of Chinese parents choose Chinese vernacular schools, and I think it's well-established by now that a lot of these parents do this purely because national schools aren't delivering the quality of education they want.

The issue of Chinese students is a trickier one, especially because I'm not sure what data is publicly available on this. The anecdotal evidence I have strongly suggests that the Chinese are disproportionally represented among top performing students.

It does not help public perception at all that our government tends to further this, with officials' not-so-subtle lamentations about how Malay students need more help to compete against their peers. This perception has been around since independence -- Tunku and Tun Dr Ismail both talked a lot about how the Malays would need help to compete against the Chinese academically and professionally. Tun Dr Mahathir took this rhetoric to another level, both in his statements and his policies.

But a lot of academic literature suggests that it is precisely these kinds of stereotypes which become self-fulfilling prophecies. Because we think the Chinese are more academically-inclined, Chinese students perform better. Because we think the Malays need help, they become demotivated in school.

Even if we aren't consciously aware of these effects, I wouldn't be surprised to find them here. Other studies which have attempted to account for stereotyping often find such unconscious effects. A common experiment is to make students read a passage about stereotyping (e.g. in the US one might ask a class to read about how East Asian men often outperform other demographics on mathematics tests), and then make them take a test where that stereotype applies. When the stereotype has been "primed," students from the underperforming groups (such as white males or women, in our example of supposed East Asian aptitude for maths) do poorer compared to a control group, where no stereotypes have been primed.

It would be interesting to see if we can carry out a counterpart to that American study here. The study I mentioned earlier showed that simply encouraging black students to think about themselves positively through a writing exercise slashed the white-black achievement gap by 40 per cent. A follow-up study two years later shows that the benefits remain.

Living in Malaysia, you can't help but be exposed to all sorts of stereotypes everyday. I think a lot of us are constantly primed for exposure to particular stereotypes, especially in urban areas. It would be interesting to study how much of this achievement gap we perceive between different demographics can be narrowed purely by accounting for and neutralising these stereotypes.

PhD Taxi Driver in Singapore

2009-08-29T20:59:00.002+08:00

Wow, this blows my mind. I don't even know how to categorize this!

Dodgy Degrees

2009-08-23T12:26:00.003+08:00

Comprehensive write-up in the Star on dodgy degrees, a topic which we've blogged a lot about on this blog. Buyers beware!

Youth to Youth Forum

2009-08-08T21:16:00.001+08:00

Hey guys, check out this upcoming forum. List of distinguished young leaders in Malaysia sharing their thoughts on a variety of topics.

Congrats to Datin Seri Rosmah for her Honorary PhD!

2009-08-04T10:58:00.002+08:00

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the wife of our 6th Prime Minister, Datin Seri Rosmah, for receiving an Honorary Doctorate from UiTM in recognition of her contribution towards early education.

"In his speech, vice-chancellor Datuk Seri Prof Dr Ibrahim Abu Shah said Rosmah’s diligence towards propagating early education had resulted in the formulation and formalisation of policies in the area.

He said Rosmah had launched the Permata Project to raise the quality of early education programmes and to make it available to more children, especially those in the rural areas, through the setting-up of Permata centres nationwide."

UiTM Professor Seeks PhD Students

2009-07-31T01:09:00.002+08:00

A professor from UiTM in the faculty of chemical engineering has informed us of an opportunity for students looking to pursue their PhD in the field. We are publishing this notice as a public service for interested students, and this should not be taken as an endorsement of the programme. The details:

Ph.D. studentship opportunities

Master's degree holders interested to pursue Ph.D. in any of the following research themes at Faculty of Chemical Engineering, Universiti Teknologi MARA are invited to forward their CVs to yinyang@salam.uitm.edu.my and yinyang@streamyx.com. A stipend will be provided for the suitable candidate to support his/her study.

The research themes are:

1) Hazardous waste treatment (e-waste; soil, water and air decontamination).
2) Synthesis and application of nanoporous materials.
3) Life cycle assessment
4) Clean technologies
5) Brownfield management

Candidates that show excellent progress during their study shall be considered for paid short-term research placements in either Japan, South Korea, Australia or Germany. The selection criteria for this Ph.D. studentship are listed in the following:

1) Good written english;
2) Published at least an ISI-indexed journal article as the first author (preferably - not essential);
3) Graduated either cum laude or has at least an Upper Second Class Honours undergraduate engineering or science degree.

Admissions Workshop for Top US Universities and Liberal Arts Colleges

2009-07-28T01:14:00.003+08:00

If you missed the DECC info session on top US institutions this past Saturday, Yeoh Chen Chow (Cornell '05) is organising a three-day workshop to walk students through the exact process of applying to the best schools in the US.

All eight Ivy Leagues will be represented by alumni or current students at the workshop -- I'll be there for Dartmouth -- in addition to 11 other prestigious institutions (if you haven't heard of schools like Brandeis or Mt. Holyoke, look them up on Wikipedia). Interviewers for Harvard, UPenn, MIT, and Cornell will be there as well. This Saturday a lot of us were talking about how we wished this sort of resource had been available when we applied, so if you're thinking about the US for your undergraduate studies, we really hope you'll attend this workshop.

Details:

Date:- 1st Aug 2009 (Sat), 2nd Aug 2009 (Sun), 15th August 2009 (Sat).
Time:- 10am to around 5pm/6pm for each day.
Venue:- Taylor's University College, Subang Jaya
Cost:- RM25 for all 3 days (Payable by cash on registration in Day 1)

The fee will be waived or reduced if you have financial difficulties. To sign up for the workshop and for more information, visit http://usapps2009.blogspot.com/.

Register for MSLS 09

2009-07-22T21:23:00.002+08:00

The Malaysian Students Leaders Summit 09 is taking place on the 8th and 9th of August in KL. Click here for further details. I'd encourage all our readers who are students and are back in Malaysia to attend this for 2 reasons. Firstly, it's a great opportunity for you to hear directly and possibly meet many prominent Malaysian business and political leaders. Who knows, you may even hear them say things which are not 'on the record' and show a side which you've not seen before. Secondly and more importantly, it's a good chance for you to meet other students who share similar interests be it in politics, business, the environment, education etc...

For those who have already signed up, I just have 2 pieces of advice for you. Firstly, keep an open mind. Try to interact with as many people as possible including other students. Don't try to just hobnob with the politicians or students who are from Oxford or Cambridge or one of the Ivy league schools. Cast your net wide. You'll learn more this way. Secondly, don't be afraid to ask questions especially those which you don't know the answers to. Don't be afraid to push the speakers especially in areas in which you think they may not feel comfortable to venture.

Enjoy!

Science & Maths in BM Again II

2009-07-09T15:11:00.005+08:00

Some on this blog has called for my comments on this issue. Some have even emailed me privately to "declare my stand". Well, I wrote on my Facebook early today a short note on my position, which I copy below. I've also taken the liberty to also include some of the 40+ comments on this issue so far in this post.

"Tony Pua hopes that schools in urban areas where the students, teachers and parents are keen to retain English as the medium for Maths and Science will be given a choice to opt out of the switch back to BM/BC, especially in secondary schools."

I've also made the following short comment to another Facebook friend who had asked the same:

"My stand is that PIBG should have a say/choice in the language use, particularly in urban areas where competency in English is already fairly high and in demand. You/we should push for this.

Rural areas can't help it, especially with teachers who can't even string a sentence together in English."

The above is my personal and public position which I will highlight in parliament. I've also written on the same in my Chinese column in Oriental Daily a few months back.

DAP's position, for those who are interested, is that urban national primary and secondary schools should be given a choice by the parents on the language to be used. Some have accused the party of staying silent on the issue. I beg to differ. Both Chong Eng, MP for Bukit Mertajam as well as the party Secretary-General, Lim Guan Eng has made the party's stand known for a while now. But if the press doesn't print (or print it often enough), there's little we can do.

Selected comments from my Facebook update:

Vivian Chiang at 10:13 on 09 July
i totally agreed that ..hopefully
Bee Hui Chuah at 10:21 on 09 July
yes... agree!!! especially secondary school!!! Education, is not Experiment!!!
Justin Wee at 10:22 on 09 July
It's a silly thing to scrap of, the malay lingu 'experiment' was conducted ever since the early 70's, & it's almost 30 years project. For a mere less than 10 years project on english medium being scrap of, it's not a pronounced fair campaign

We cant compare our so called 'looking at other nation', whereby the japanese still maintains their language, and the french themselves. but bare in mind that these nations have 'comparative advantage'.

Japan has their advantages on technology, and the nation is a pioneer export to America, so they eventually 'do not have to worry on language', but anyways, they do learn english, but i bet their learning is WAY better then here itself... Read more
Kong Chia Yew at 10:25 on 09 July
You should put this suggestion up to Parliament if you get a chance. Will be a pain in the ass for administrators of the policy but then the old maxim takes over "it'sfor the best of us"
Steven Fung at 10:29 on 09 July
can they do that?
Lim Yong Keat at 10:31 on 09 July
what is the ministry doing? we are not like Japan or US or Germany.
KhengTeong Goh at 10:32 on 09 July
In a LOCAL university. Some of the lecturers allow us to answer in English although the questions were in BM. In final year, we are strongly encouraged to write our thesis in English. And our exam papers were in 2 languages, English and BM....
Eoh Teng Kor at 10:32 on 09 July
why not creating english medium school for the option no 4. since we can allow "international school" , i dont see why we cannot have one more option.
Terrassie Lau at 10:40 on 09 July
At the end of the day, for the younger generations, it is again ' head you win, tail I lose" We may soon ended up without english lessons too if the money spent do not generate good english teachers, in accordance to the DPM's silly statement. Just scrap english la.
See Hong at 10:48 on 09 July
Actually good result not related wt language. Japanese, Germany, Italian, France ppl also not study in English, but today they still advanced country. It is the matter of education system. Correct way is study in mother language in Primary, English in Secondary. Since so good why need to wait another 3 yrs ? To prepare for the changes & objection of TDM ~ the idiot who initiate this plan few yrs ago ?
Felix Leong at 10:59 on 09 July
Japan, Germany, Italy and France ARE PART OF G-7! They are the world's economic power house and their domestic markets are huge! What are we ???
Albert Tan at 11:00 on 09 July
For those in Form 1 now should be allowed to use English in Form 4 and Form 5 in 2012 and 2014 so that continuity is maintained.
Claire Khoo at 11:05 on 09 July
eh hello ... to implement immediately, where to find books? Excuse me, you wanna scold the gohmen also think before you scold can? its like the Dong Zong head who said we should implement this immediately. Buku mana nak cari? Guru mana nak cari? (I think our education system really failed, that's why obviously malaysians don't think before they comment.)
Leroy Ng at 11:13 on 09 July
The decision is political and politically backward mindedness. Unfortunately PKR's Anwar Ibrahim and PAS support this decision. Why DAP kept silence b4 decision made?
Chin-Huat Wong at 11:21 on 09 July
revive English schools as a form of mother tongue education!!!
JooLee Tan at 11:27 on 09 July
I believe that DAP is also in favour of this reversal. Tony, I think it's futile to even suggest an option that hasn't been discussed. Frankly, the whole exercise has been futile and our children and grandchildren will be paying the price for generations to come.
Eoh Teng Kor at 11:31 on 09 July
Agreed with See Hong, it is about system. We just allow BM/BC/BT/English medium in Science and Math. Let parents have a choice/option. Let parents decide which is suitable for their kids...
Lillian Danielle Khoo at 11:36 on 09 July
I am surprised the DAP was in favour of the reversal. Meanwhile UAE has just announced that they plan to teach Math & Science in English. http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090702/NATIONAL/707019852/1019

It just seems like Malaysia is taking 1 step forward and 3 steps back in our education system. They made a good decision to make it compulsory in passing English - I couldn't believe that it was optional to pass in the first place. Then they decide to revert Math & Science back to BM. During my studies, I had the opportunity to share classes with ...
Cheryl Witha at 11:52 on 09 July
what's new with the education system? Student have always been lab rats, they constantly change the system to suit whoever is currently in tht position(at their whim and fancy). It has always been absurd and still is. They never think things through, ever. What is to happen to our education system, I feel very sad as an educator..
Fok Kuk Fai at 12:00 on 09 July
I agree with using mother tongue as teaching medium at the primary school level. But I strongly advocate to shift it to English medium in secondary school level and above. This is not only for enhancing English proficiency, but also for the future generations to easily access to the science and technology as well as social science knowledge pool ...
Juliana Yoong at 12:00 on 09 July
What a shame! I totally agreed...
Cheryl Witha at 12:07 on 09 July
I teach at college level and every batch that comes in..well most of them can't even speak English let alone write a simple application letter. What is to become of them in the future?
Chong Hou Yin at 12:22 on 09 July
learn from singapore please, stupid najib
Joseph Ng Swee Wan at 12:28 on 09 July
malaysia will be back to those 1970's day ...... we are going backward and not forward. let's see in the next 6 years, where are we heading? oh, maybe by then DPM wil be out of job and poor PR has to take over this baby and to answer to everyone for such absurd policy.
Ho Kok Kuan at 12:28 on 09 July
All for PPSMI to be retained. Dual languge in primary, follow by full English in secondary school. Person will be fully equipped when leaving for uni/college.
Marsha Maung at 13:21 on 09 July
YES PLEASE!! I am so sad with the switch to BM/Chinese!
Walinong Sari at 13:28 on 09 July
No. Follow the MOE directive.
Alwin Lim at 13:38 on 09 July
Havent we done enough damage to our brilliant childrens ?
Steven K C Poh at 13:58 on 09 July
I'm bewildered by this news. We have a flip-flopping government that's playing Russian roulette with our children's future. What now? How can we stop this madness?
Lee Wei Jie at 14:02 on 09 July
secondary schools should retain English as medium for Maths and Science so that pupils can have a bright future to study overseas and be linked to the world trend...it is good to switch back mother tongue for primary school level as it is a good way to build up the basis of children, let them hv a effective learning process and happy childhood...
Ooi Beng Sun at 14:21 on 09 July
agreed with Lee Wei Jie. secondary students should be given the choice to choose the medium of instructions. we should not deprive our gifted students who are proficient in English acquire more knowledge to pursue their career. reverting to malay is like chaining our children with big stone, stop their progress, making them going backwards to the dinosaur age!!!
Daniel Hong Aan Lee at 14:22 on 09 July
YB, I believe that Science&Maths for primary education should be taught in mother tongue (esp for SJK(C)/SJK(T)), however secondary schools should teach their science&maths in english, so that the Malaysian english teaching system will not deteriorate.

Science and Maths to be taught in BM again

2009-07-08T17:04:00.003+08:00

Thank you to the anonymous commenter who brought this to our attention; I am sure Tony and Kian Ming will have a lot to say about this. Here is the story from The Malaysian Insider, and here are some graphs from The Star. My take is as follows:

This is horrible. But anything which had a realistic chance of happening would be almost as bad.

In a perfect world, students would be learning all subjects in the best language for them individually, and also learning Malay and English perfectly fine regardless. But we do not live in that perfect world. In the next best world, we would have a consistent policy (sticking to either English or Malay for Science and Maths, if not all subjects) and competent teachers able to implement this policy.

This being Malaysia, and our politics being our politics, what we got was a silly compromise that made nobody very happy, and a paralysed bureaucracy uninterested in making this policy work. One of the most telling graphs in the link to The Star above is the last one, which shows only 20% and 10% of secondary and primary school science and maths teachers respectively scored 67 or higher on an evaluation of their English proficiency.

The fact is, this policy failed. But was the old policy working? As far as I can tell, no. That's why we tried this policy in the first place. Our students were not doing as well as they could in science and maths, and their English was atrocious. So our politicians got this bright idea to try teaching them science and maths in English.

But the execution was fatally cocked up. The Education Minister says that now they will try a different approach to enhance English learning: English literature will be reintroduced as a subject, along with grammar and composition. (I wonder if that is a misquote by The Star, because that would make a total of four subjects for the English language alone.) The Minister also said that they would rehire retirees and foreigners if necessary to supply more English teachers.

All these are things which should have been done before! In particular, it's not like the government had no idea our science and maths teachers were so fatally flawed in the English department. Rather, they completely ignored this, and rammed through this ill-thought-out policy anyway.

Maybe teaching science and maths in English is a fatally flawed idea, but we have no way of telling that from this six-year experiment, because the government so thoroughly messed up its implementation! (There is also the counter-argument that teaching these subjects in English worked perfectly fine for thousands of schoolkids before we switched to Malay as the national medium of instruction in the 1970s.)

What really angers me about this decision is that the government virtually knowingly had this cock-up of a policy going for six years, when they should have bloody well known their science and maths teachers could not teach in English. So we had a whole generation of students undergoing this massive change, all for naught. And now we will have another generation of pain as thousands of kids get stuck in educational limbo while the government phases out this failure of a policy.

All this was completely unnecessary. The government could have at least tried to make PPSMI (Pelajaran dan Pembelajaran Sains dan Math dalam Bahasa Inggeris) a success by not virtually sabotaging it, but they did not. They could have increased the allocation of time to English, refocused the curriculum, and hired professional English teachers six years ago, but they did not.

More importantly, the government could have avoided all this and successfully transitioned to teaching science and maths in English if only it had been patient and first prepared the teachers to use English in the classroom. But they did not. They pushed through the policy when it was plainly not ready.

In short, we spent six years spinning our wheels doing absolutely balls, and we have nothing to show for it. It is infuriating, but I don't blame the government for ending this now. I do blame the government for keeping up this ridiculous charade for six years, when it was obvious to almost everyone -- even people who might have otherwise favoured this policy -- that this could never have worked with the way they rammed it through.

Introducing Top US Universities & Colleges

2009-07-08T16:48:00.006+08:00

Descartes Education Counselling Centre (DECC), a non-profit organisation will be organising a talk by former and current students from some of the top universities in the United States on getting into these schools.

The panelists will comprise alumni and students from Ivy League universities such as Harvard, Dartmouth, Yale and Cornell, as well as other top liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore, Middlebury, Bates and Colby.

Therefore all students interested in top universities and colleges in the US for undergraduate study or those who are still figuring out what to do for their tertiary studies, come join us for the talk at:

Introducing Top US Universities & Colleges

Date : 25th July 2009 (Saturday)
Time : 11am-4pm
Venue : Auditorium, Sunway University College

Confirmed panelists include:

Nathaniel Tan, Harvard University ‘03
Yeoh Chen Chow, Cornell University ‘05
Hwa Yang Jerng, Bates College ‘03
Emily Chan, Colby College ‘11
Ng Eng Han, Dartmouth College ‘10
John Lee, Dartmouth College ‘11
Andrew Loh, Swarthmore College '10
Anand Pillai, Northwestern University '04
Joan Low, Middlebury College '12
Lim Su Ann, Columbia University '12
Philip Loh, Olin College '13

They will share their personal experiences with the US education system – a system that reputably produces very employable graduates and world leaders with great competency and capabilities. They will also provide interested students with valuable information about selecting the right university, obtaining financial assistance, completing application forms and other practical information on gaining places in these schools.

Students will also learn about the unusual perks and opportunities offered under the US education system (foreign study programmes, self-designed curriculums, freedom to explore personal academic interests, etc.), aspects of a vastly different culture, and student life. To top it off, we have an interactive session, where you can mingle around and talk with the students and alumni yourself personally.

All are welcome and attendance is free.

For more information, please contact Ms Teh Joo Shin @ jshin48 (at) gmail (DOT) com.

Richard Feynman on Learning

2009-07-05T19:30:00.003+08:00

Richard Feynman was an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum electrodynamics. He was an eccentric figure, and quite a few books have been written by him and or about him on the subject of his life. One of the most famous, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! is now available for reading online, absolutely free. (If reading online gives you eyestrain, there's always Amazon.)

The book deals with a wide range of fascinating topics, from sex to business to art, but because Feynman spent most of his life in academia, it focuses on education. The book is primarily a collection of loosely-related essays, so you can skip the irrelevant parts if you don't find them interesting, but I recommend you read the whole book anyway. The following essays are especially relevant to education:

Lucky Numbers
O Americana, Outra Vez!
Judging Books by Their Covers

Lucky Numbers has a very interesting twist on the standard litany about the evils of rote memorisation. Feynman describes how he was able to best a Japanese man armed with an abacus because he had memorised more combinations of numbers and operations:

I realized something: he doesn't know numbers. With the abacus, you don't have to memorize a lot of arithmetic combinations; all you have to do is learn how to push the little beads up and down. You don't have to memorize 9 + 7 = 16; you just know that when you add 9 you push a ten's bead up and pull a one's bead down. So we're slower at basic arithmetic, but we know numbers.

Feynman's point is that it's understanding which matters the most, and that there is not always a conflict between understanding and memorisation. Sometimes, you need to memorise something to understand it. The abacus salesman had merely memorised how to work an abacus, without internalising any understanding of numbers and how they relate to one another. Because he worked with numbers, day in and day out, Feynman knew them like the back of his hand.

O Americana, Outra Vez! is a meandering essay on the time Feynman spent lecturing in Brazil, but it is absolutely worth reading because of its emphasis on the need for the right philosophy of learning. Much of it is still very applicable to the Malaysian education system:

After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. When they heard "light that is reflected from a medium with an index," they didn't know that it meant a material such as water. They didn't know that the "direction of the light" is the direction in which you see something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized, yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words.

This particular discussion caught my eye because it reminded me instantly of all the revision books students buy to supplement their textbooks and lectures:

So I came in, carrying the elementary physics textbook that they used in the first year of college. They thought this book was especially good because it had different kinds of typeface -- bold black for the most important things to remember, lighter for less important things, and so on.

...

I stuck my finger in, and I started to read: "Triboluminescence. Triboluminescence is the light emitted when crystals are crushed..."

I said, "And there, have you got science? No! You have only told what a word means in terms of other words. You haven't told anything about nature -- what crystals produce light when you crush them, why they produce light. Did you see any student go home and try it? He can't.

Feynman hated the way Brazilians taught science; he refused to call it science at all. He felt the students were not learning anything meaningful about the natural world around them; they were just memorising words and numbers without learning how to relate these abstractions to the real-world concepts they represent.

Judging Books By Their Covers describes what happened when Feynman served on a board of parents and educators preparing the list of approved textbooks for the state of California. Feynman again found himself infuriated by the books, because they explained everything in a completely unrelatable manner:

I turned the page. The answer was, for the wind-up toy, "Energy makes it go." And for the boy on the bicycle, "Energy makes it go." For everything, "Energy makes it go."

Now that doesn't mean anything. Suppose it's "Wakalixes." That's the general principle: "Wakalixes makes it go." There's no knowledge coming in. The child doesn't learn anything; it's just a word!

What they should have done is to look at the wind-up toy, see that there are springs inside, learn about springs, learn about wheels, and never mind "energy." Later on, when the children know something about how the toy actually works, they can discuss the more general principles of energy.

The whole book is a thoroughly entertaining piece of literature, and there is more to learning and academia in it than the bits and pieces I have just quoted. The opening essays which deal with Feynman's childhood in particular show how he himself first learned and developed an interest for science. I hope you find this book useful in thinking about the purpose of education, and how we should go about fulfilling this purpose.

Pakatan's Education and Higher Education Cabinet Committee

2009-07-02T21:27:00.003+08:00

Hot off the press. The following opposition MPs have been put on the cabinet committee for the Education portfolio: Yusmadi Yusoff (PKR), Che Uda Che Nik (PAS), Chong Eng (DAP) and for the Higher Education portfolio: Zulkifli Nordin (PKR), Salahuddin Ayub (PAS), Tony Pua (DAP).

I think it's high time that the Pakatan coalition formed its own version of a shadow 'cabinet'. Hopefully this will mean a more structured focus on the part of these MPs, especially those which have been allocated the Education and Higher Education portfolios.

These six MPs are an interesting and mixed bunch. Yusmadi Yusoff is a young, idealistic PKR MP for Balik Pulau in Penang and I've had the opportunity to interact with him a few times. He was a Hubert Humphrey fellow for a year here in the US and is a lawyer by vocation. I'm sure he'll bring fresh ideas and perspectives to his portfolio. Chong Eng, an experienced MP from Bukit Mertajam, is a fiery and passionate DAP MP. She's been very outspoken on women's issues as an MP. I hope that she will do more than just highlight the plight of Chinese and Indian schools but look at how the Education Ministry can do a better job, perhaps in examining how some of their policies may effect girls and boys differently. The gender gap is becoming more significant at the university level (in favor of women) and I think there must be some steps which can be taken at the pre-university level which can arrest this trend. I don't know much about Che Uda Che Nik from PAS except to say that he's the PAS MP for Sik, Kedah.

We're all familiar with Tony's work as the MP for PJ Utara and on this blog. Hopefully, being allocated this portfolio will free up some time for Tony to put forth some of his ideas on Higher Education in Malaysia. I'm sure he'll have an interesting time working with Zulkifli Nordin of PKR, MP for Kulim, who is more well known for his tirades against Sisters in Islam and for protesting the Bar Council forum on religious conversions, than for his view on Higher Education in Malaysia. Salahuddin Ayub, PAS MP for Kubang Kerian, was the former PAS Youth chief and is a seasoned politician. It will be interesting to hear his views on the state of Higher Education in Malaysia since I've not heard him speak on this before.

Hopefully, having these cabinet committees will increase the quality and level of debate in parliament especially when it comes to the Education and Higher Education portfolios. Congrats and all the best to Tony!

'New' JPA scholarship next year?

2009-06-30T22:53:00.002+08:00

Read this in the Star last weekend. "A new category will be established starting next year for scholarships under the Public Services Department scheme to be awarded purely based on merit, regardless of race."

PUTRAJAYA: Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun razak said he was sure that such a category would be welcomed by all communities, including the Chinese.

“We are re-studying the distribution of scholarships under the Public Services Department scheme to introduce a new category.

“Starting next year, we will see the distribution of scholarships based purely on merit, regardless of race.

“We will announce it next year and with the plan to limit to 10 subjects, we expect to see a more level playing field,” he said in his speech at a dinner organised by both MCA and the Associated Chinese Chamber of Industry and Commerce here Saturday.

Najib said this would allow Malaysia’s best students to get aid to pursue higher studies.

“So we will get the best of best and the creme de la creme getting aid for higher studies.

“I believe this will be accepted well and it will allow each individual a fair chance to realise his full potential,” he said, adding however that he was not “letting the cat out of the bag” just yet on the scheme.

Najib said contrary to common perception, not all Chinese were rich.

“Like all Malaysians, they also want to see their children have good education and become successful. All this involves costs,” he said, adding that every race had its needs and if the Government could bring policies that were fair, the Chinese would continue to support Barisan Nasional.

Najib said the Chinese was not against Malays succeeding or opposed to efforts to help the Bumiputra but that they wanted policies that looked at the needs of all Malaysians fairly.

“And that’s why I included it in the 1Malaysia concept,” he said, adding that he would also look into MCA president Datuk Seri Ong Tee Keat’s request for more government land to build Chinese vernacular schools.

Najib added that during his trip to China, the Chinese government had also promised to bring more investments into Malaysia in the term of equity investments.

“I’m told they are preparing a loan fund if we need this as a sign of their commitment to us. I believe there is an opportunity for China to make an economic boost in Malaysia in terms of development that will include banking as well,” he said.

“I looked into the needs of the local Chinese community when I introduced the 1Malaysia plan, which looks into the needs of every community regardless of the colour, ethnicity and culture.

MCA president Datuk Seri Ong Tee Keat said in his speech that the dinner was not just to celebrate the appointment of Najib as Prime Minister but to also show that the Chinese community would always be with the Government and his leadership as it strived to overcome the current economic problems.

A few comments:

(i) There is already a portion of the JPA scholarships which are allocated by merit (20% out of 2100 foreign JPA scholarships). Read this previous entry for more details. How will this new category of JPA scholarships be any different? Will they be restricted to those students who only take 10 subjects at the SPM level? Will there be a separate application and interview process?

(ii) Nothing is said here about the process by which these students will be bonded to the government. I've said this time and time again - most JPA foreign scholarship holders do not come back to serve the government, if they come back to Malaysia at all. There's no use giving out a new scholarship that is merit based if these students are not made to come back to serve the government in some capacity.

(iii) Nothing is said here about how the civil service will be restructured to cater to these scholarship holders. Again, I don't put the entire blame on these JPA scholars because the civil service is reluctant to take in these JPA scholars probably because they know that these high achievers will probably be bored by the career path taken by most civil servants.

I'd prefer the PM to focus on ensuring that JPA scholars are held accountable and the civil service is restructured so that these JPA scholars can come back to serve the government instead of creating another category of scholarships at taxpayers' expense.

Thoughts on the university admissions process

2009-06-30T22:51:00.003+08:00

A friend of mine, Rajan Rishyakaran, has written a good blog post critiquing the Malaysian university admissions process. While I don't know enough about local universities to comment on many things he raises, there are a couple of points which I think are worth emphasising: the difference between policy in theory and policy in reality, and the importance of decentralising some decisions.

There are many illustrations of the difference between something in theory and something in practice, but Rajan's example of coursework is as good as any. In principle, adding coursework to the evaluation process for university admissions would be a good thing.

After all, a major problem with our education system is that it focuses a lot on examinations which only assess students at one point in time, and often encourage rote memorisation instead of actual learning. If you fall sick during exam period, it can dramatically change your life's course, because you might not get into the university you otherwise could, or not pursue the degree you otherwise would attain. And because the format and style of exams is so predictable, all you need to do is practice with enough exam papers from previous years to be prepared -- you don't necessarily need to understand anything on the exam (I have found that understanding too much can actually be detrimental to your marks in some Malaysian exams).

If we emphasised coursework more, then one-off incidents which might negatively impact your exam performance would matter less: you have a substantial amount of time to do your coursework. Because the key element of your coursework is usually a report on something you have researched, you actually learn something useful: you learn how to write academically, and you learn some basic research or factfinding skills.

That's the theory; the practical reality is something else altogether. When I was in school, nobody took coursework seriously. Or rather, they took it the same way they took an exam: they figured out the best way to game the system, and they did it. Everyone would Google their topic, and instead of writing up a report about it, they would plagarise the most relevant websites. If they were too lazy to do this, they would plagiarise from one another very openly -- there was no stigma to copying or cheating off someone else's work.

It's not that they were lazy; it's that they knew this was the most efficient way to get things done. Teachers don't really care if the material is obviously plagiarised -- to them the coursework system is often a burdensome imposition on them because they have to read through dozens, if not hundreds of reports. Students know this, so they intentionally put a lot of work into making their reports more burdensome on teachers. One teacher's son told me that he intentionally put lots of irrelevant diagrams and photos in his coursework because this would discourage the teacher from looking too hard at his work -- she would see he had obviously worked hard on the report, and give him high marks.

The problem with coursework is that it is an arbitrary, artificial system of evaluation imposed by the central government with little thought as to what the schools and teachers can do, and little thought for what universities want to see. As Rajan notes, our university admissions process is extremely centralised -- everything is boiled down to a couple of numbers, which are then fed into the government's system. The government then tells you what university you will attend, and what degree you will pursue.

Likewise, with coursework, the government tells schools how to grade students' work, and it tells universities how these grades must translate into admissions decisions. There is no room for a teacher to assess students in his or her own way, to try something different. Neither is there room for a university to assess students in a different way, such as through tailored interviews or personal statements.

Obviously, there are pitfalls to granting educators more autonomy. But I don't think there is any question that at the moment we err far too heavily on the side of ridiculous centralisation. The government has attempted to standardise the education system to an extreme, and the result is something easily gamed by the pretence of ability, instead of actual demonstrable results. The government needs to grant universities more leeway in making their admissions decisions, and at the same time experiment with giving schools more freedom in coming up with alternative methods of assessment.

Missionary schools model for 1 Malaysia?

2009-06-30T22:12:00.002+08:00

Malaysia's 6th PM, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, is a product of St. John's Institution in KL. Recently, he went back to his alma mater and proclaimed that the missionary school model represents what he sees in his 1 Malaysia vision. I'll reproduce the full article from the Malaysian Insider below and comment after that.

KUALA LUMPUR, June 27 — A visit to his Christian alma mater was used today by Datuk Seri Najib Razak to drive home his vision of 1 Malaysia which was officially launched at Dataran Merdeka earlier this morning.

The prime minister, who officiated the opening of the Conference of Christian Mission Schools in Malaysia at the St John’s Institution here, paid tribute to mission schools and their role in nation building.

He said mission schools had a special ethos which promote unity, very much like his vision of 1 Malaysia.

Najib is led by the school captain, as he walks to the St.John's school hall for the conference.
“The ethos of mission schools shaped the values and beliefs of students which is in line with 1 Malaysia.”

He said that part and parcel of the concept of 1 Malaysia was to accept diversity and a plural society as a heritage and strength instead of a source of problems.

“1 Malaysia goes beyond tolerance but accepts diversity,” he said, adding that it would be achieved if Malaysians could look beyond race, colour and religions.

“I am convinced it we continue on this path Malaysia can be stronger.”

Najib said that St John's had provided him the sound grounding which eventually made him the prime minister of Malaysia.

He said that returning to the school had brought back special memories, including the times he walked up the hill (Jalan Bukit Nanas) to the school with his heavy bag and playing pranks with his friends.

He also joked that his father gave him a promotion, enrolling him straight into Standard Two at St John’s Primary School, where he spent five years, and a further three years at St John’s Secondary.

He paid tribute to the former and present teachers of the school and even called out to a La Salle Christian Brother in the crowd, who was his former teacher.

This was the scene earlier when Najib entered his alma mater accompanied by the famous St.John's school band.
Najib also took the occasion to have a swipe at Victoria Institution, the traditional rivals of St John’s.

“We are even better than the ‘other school’ in KL,” he joked.
He closed his speech with a special announcement, saying that he would officially declare his old school a National Heritage Site on July 12.

I won't go into the debate on what 1 Malaysia means exactly.

Rather, I want to make a couple of observations:

(i) I think it's a good thing that Najib is planning to declare SJI as a National Heritage Site next month. Hopefully this means that the school will not be torn down to make way for a shopping center, the way BBGS was torn down because it was located in prime real estate.

(ii) More importantly, I think the spirit and nature of many of the missionary schools in Malaysia, including SJI, has changed since the time when Najib was in school. The 'nationalization' of these schools which includes putting in headmasters and headmistresses which have no conception of the philosophy of the missionary schools or the La Sallian tradition and many attempts by MOE officials to 'de-Christianize' these schools have led to a drop in standards, both academic and disciplinary.

It is not enough to just say that the philosophy of the missionary schools capture the spirit of what 1 Malaysia means but Najib has to act in such a way to ensure that this spirit is returned to the missionary schools and promoted in other national schools.

One possible way, which Dr. Goh Cheng Teik has recommended, is to bring back the brothers into the school boards of the various La Salle schools to that their influence is still felt.

Other ways include emphasizing a culture and spirit which respects diversity and inclusiveness in the teacher training schools so that the teachers and headmasters can teach as well as practice what it means to respect all religions and races.

I'm not sure about the educational background of Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, the current Minister of Education, but hopefully he can pick up on what Najib has said and will make this an important priority in his agenda.

The future of La Salle Schools?

2009-06-18T23:06:00.002+08:00

Well written letter in the Star by Dr. Goh Cheng Teik on the future of La Salle schools in Malaysia. I think his suggestion of handing back the administration of these schools to the 'brothers' is interesting but I'm not sure if there are enough 'brothers' around to administer these schools. I'll reproduce the letter in full below. (BTW, I was from La Salle PJ, primary and secondary, until Form 3)

Thursday June 18, 2009
Hand back ‘Saint’ schools to the La Salle Brothers

YOUR report “An end of an era for La Sallians” (The Star, May 1) stirred deep emotions in the hearts of those who had studied at the 50 La Salle schools in the country. The exit of Bro Paul Ho, the last Brother Director from St Xavier’s Institution does look like the end of an era.

But Old Xaverians and Old Lasallians do pray that Bro Paul’s retirement would not be the end of the involvement of Christian Brothers in Malaysian schools. At the recent Yayasan La Salle Board meeting on June 6, former UPM Vice Chancellor Tan Sri Syed Jalaluddin, an Old Xaverian, made a passionate plea for the Christian Brothers to stay engaged in Malaysia. The meeting was chaired by Tan Sri Kamarulzaman Shariff, another Old Xaverian and a former Mayor of Kuala Lumpur, who mandated Syed Jalaluddin to sketch out a road map for the coming years.

Old Lasallians like Syed Jalaluddin and Kamarulzaman value what the Brothers have done and wish that they can do more. Unfortunately, the congregation of La Salle Brothers worldwide has shrunk. F

ewer and fewer youths in the modern world are prepared to embrace the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience for the sake of educating children from impoverished families. The Brothers have to conserve their manpower and deploy their resources smartly.

The present thinking is that Old La Sallians who have friends in high places should convince the Government to hand back two schools, St John’s Institution and St. Xavier’s Institution, to the La Salle Brothers to manage and administer. At the same time, the Government should convert both schools from being sekolah bantuan modal into sekolah-sekolah bantuan penoh.

Schools like St John’s and St Xavier’s have shown that they have withstood the test of time. After all, St John’s has produced Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak, the present Prime Minister; Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein, Home Minister; Datuk Sri Nazir Tun Razak, the banker and younger brother of Najib and Raja Nazrin Shah, the Raja Muda of Perak.

St Xavier’s has produced Karpal Singh, the opposition leader; Tun Hamid Omar, the former Lord President; Tan Sri Nor Nor Mohamed Yakcop, the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department.

Both schools can be depended upon to make proper use of the financial resources and enhanced powers given to them. They should be challenged - at the right moment - to bring back the academic and extra-curricular excellence that they had enjoyed in the past. These include competency in the English language, both written and spoken.

I believe making St John’s and St Xavier’s fully-aided schools and mandating the La Salle Brothers and the respective boards of governors to administer them is the answer. Taking both schools private sounds great in theory but in practice, funds would have to be raised all the time. Fees have to be charged and revised upward regularly.

Those students who cannot pay would have to be barred from attending classes. The La Salle Brothers would not be comfortable with a fee-based regime. Their philosophy is to provide education to those who need it, not only to those who can pay for it.

Syed Jalaluddin’s mission is delicate and important. As someone who had studied in a La Salle school and who had worked as a Vice Chancellor of a public university, he can bridge the communication gap between the La Salle Brothers and the politicians and civil servants.

He can get a dialogue going. For all you know, he may find an ally in the person of the PM since Najib is an Old Lasallian.

Dr GOH CHENG TEIK,

Kuala Lumpur.

Making sense of the JPA numbers

2009-06-18T03:06:00.002+08:00

Read this article in the Star about a question directed to Nazri in parliament in regard to JPA scholarships. I'll reproduce it in full below since it has a lot of numbers in it. My comments follow.

68% of merit scholarships went to non-Bumiputra

KUALA LUMPUR: Nearly 68% or 280 of the Public Service Department (PSD) scholarships under the 20% merit-category were awarded to non-bumiputras, said Minister in the Prime Minister's Department Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz.

He said only about 32% or 135 scholarships were awarded to bumiputra in the latest round of applications for the PSD's overseas degree programme.

"This proves that the award was not based on skin color, that the Government is fair in the selection of the 20% without looking at race, culture or religion but based on academic excellence," he told Lim Kit Siang (DAP - Ipoh Timur) in Parliament Tuesday.

He also said that PSD scholarships looked at academic excellence based on nine subjects chosen by the student relevant to the degree of their choice.

"This limit was set to ensure all students were on an equal playing field because not all schools had the same facilities and teaching manpower," he said in reply to Tan Ah Eng (BN - Gelang Patah).

At the Parliament lobby, Nazri said: “We do not do things without referring to the Federal Constitution, which means that we cannot give all for merit,” he said.

Out of 2,100 PSD scholarships for students to study abroad this year, 20%, which is 417, was reserved for those with merit, regardless of race and religion, he said.

Of the 417, almost 68% were given to non-bumiputras based on merit and only 32% for bumiputras, he said.

On complaints by those with 13As and 14As and did not get scholarships, he said he could not give them because it was not fair since some schools did not allow students to take more than 10 subjects.

That was why the Government wanted to base it on 10 subjects only, he said.

Inside the dewan, Nazri said for year 2009, PSD offered 1,176 scholarships to Bumiputras and 924 to non-Bumiputras.

He also said that more than RM2.8bil in Public Service Department (PSD) sponsorships for overseas degree courses were given out between 2000 and 2008.

The sum was given to 12,485 recipients where 9,160 were bumiputera and 3,325 were non-bumiputera.

The breakdown of table showed that allocation for scholarships increased from RM109mil in year 2000 to RM659mil last year.

Similarly, the number of students also increased from 748 in year 2000 to 2,000 last year, while 598 Bumiputra students getting scholarships in 2000 and increased to 1,100 last year.

For non-Bumiputra, number of students in year 2000 was 150 and had increased to 900 last year.

From Jan 14, 2009, the awarding criteria of the Overseas Degree Programme was divided into four categories, he said.

The first was based on academic excellence without counting race and socio-economic backgrounds where selection was based on academic results (85%), co-curriculum (10%) and interviews (5%).

The category was based on current racial population ratios where one race's allocation would be divided to others if it was not used.

"Selection is also made based on academic excellence with at least A2 in all core and elective subjects.

"At the same time, the candidates were also selected based on their secondary school co-curriculum participation, families' socio-economic backgrounds and interviews," he said.

The third category, he said, were for Sabah (5%) and Sarawakian (5%) bumiputra.

The last category was given to socially disadvantaged students from rural areas with limited facilities and from low-income families.

Nazri added that applicants in categories three and four also had to have at least A2s in all subjects relevant to their degree of choice, which made up 65% of the selection criteria.

He said students under the programme were sent for first degrees in the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, Russie, Germany, France, Czech Republic, Poland, Egypt, Jordan, India and Indonesia.

Some general comments:

According to Nazri, 1176 out of 2100 overseas JPA scholarships were given to Bumiputra students while the rest went to non-bumi students. This is very close to the 55 / 45 ethnic quota which the government promised in June 2008.

The composition of these scholarships is as follows:

60% allocated based on 'excellence' as well as the racial composition of the country.

20% allocated purely on merit without considering any ethnic quotas.

10% allocated to students from Sabah and Sarawak (which is not the 20% promised earlier)

10% allocated to students from disadvantaged backgrounds (no ethnic quota specified).

If 280 non-bumi students were allocated the JPA scholarship from the purely merit based portion, this would mean that a balance of 644 non-bumi students were given the JPA scholarship from the other two allocations i.e. the 60% allocation based on 'excellence' and racial composition of the country and the 10% allocation based on the background of a student.

Questions of ethnic quotas aside, this kind of reply from Nazri doesn't really give me any more confidence in the way in which these JPA scholarship recipients are chosen. For example, how is the pool of 20% purely merit based students selected? How are they different from the group of 'excellent' students from which the 60% allocation is given? How is a 'disadvantaged' background determined?

Unless there is more transparency in regard to the criteria for giving out these scholarships, beyond the superficial information of 60%, 20%, 10%, 10% allocated to whom and what, the questioning of the JPA scholarship allocation will continue to rage on and on.

Making an English SPM 'pass' compulsory

2009-06-16T20:48:00.003+08:00

Much has been made of the fact the DPM and Education Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin, did not know that it was not compulsory have a 'pass' in English at the SPM level. Later UMNO Youth came out to support making an English pass compulsory at the SPM level, subject to some caveats. I have some reservations about making a change to the current policy and here's why.

Firstly, this proposed policy change (making an English SPM pass compulsory) is premised on the false assumption that the standard of English will increase as a consequence of this policy change. Without any changes in the quality of teachers who teach English, especially those in the rural areas, or other resources aimed at improving the standard of English in our schools, all things being equal, this policy will only result in an increase of those who will fail their SPM because of failure to pass the English exam.

Secondly, this proposed policy change will increase the incentives to make the English exam even easier than it already is as well as to decrease the passing mark for the same exam. The bureaucrats at the MOE do not want to have political heat on their backs as a result of the protests of many parents whose children did not manage to pass their SPM English exam. The path of least resistance would be to either make the English SPM exam easier or to decrease the passing mark or to do both!

Thirdly, this proposed policy change presupposes that every SPM holder requires a passing level of English to get on with life. Sure, it would be difficult to read English textbooks and articles at the university / college level without a proficient understanding of English. But if the medium of instruction in our public universities continue to be in BM, then I see no reason why not having an English SPM pass should be the basis for denying a student entry into one of the public universities or a matriculation program. Furthermore, there are many career paths which are open to Malaysians which require only a minimal level of English proficiency. I don't see why Malaysians who choose to pursue these career paths should be denied an SPM certificate just because they fail to pass their English exam at the SPM level.

This is in no way an argument to diminish the importance of English. Most of the top jobs in the private sector require a high proficiency in English. Most of the top jobs in the civil service require at least a decent level of spoken English. But I think having this policy change distracts from the more important and pressing objective of improving the standard of English in Malaysia. Making an English pass compulsory at the SPM level is the easy part. Making substantive changes to the way English is taught in our schools in the much harder and more important challenge.

Compulsory Pass for English in SPM?

2009-06-08T21:36:00.004+08:00

This is an open letter written by Mr Philip Yong on whether a pass in English language must be made compulsory at SPM level. I'm publishing it in full.

Open Letter to Deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister Y.A.B. TAN SRI DATO' HAJI MUHYIDDIN BIN MOHD. YASSIN

Dear Tan Sri,

I am writing this letter in regard to your question thrown to the public to discuss. The question on whether a pass in the English language should be made mandatory to pass the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM).

Before I pursued my higher education at a private institution, for the whole of my schooling life I was enrolled in a local public school. Therefore with my eleven (11) years of experience in public institutions I think I am qualified to give my point of view of this what I would call as a highly significant issue.

Tan Sri,

Whenever I had an English language examination in school, I would score the subject with flying colours and I was indeed very proud of myself. But that was not until I pursued my higher education at a private institution. When I was told that I am required to take the subject in college, I was very reluctant to thinking that my proficiency of the language is above standard. I was furious but had to comply in the end. During my very first lesson, I finally understood why the institution insisted on us taking the subject. In simple words, the standard of English in public schools is definitely not on par with those in private institutions. Therefore, the first thing your Ministry should do is to review the standard of the language taught in public institutions.

In my opinion, I do not think that the English language is hard to master. If we go by the Malay proverb, ‘Melentur buluh biarlah dari rebungnya’ I believe it is achievable. In this state of reality, we should never teach our children to avoid the problem but should instead teach them tackle the problem. If their proficiency of the language is not up to par then their parents or even the government should do something to help improve it and not just lower the standard of language in the public institutions.

I would say that I am fortunate to be born into an English speaking family. If not I seriously think that my proficiency of the language would be much worse than how it is today. Although I agree that this is the role of the parents but the government is also accountable for this issue. Until this very moment, I do not agree that a pass in English should be made mandatory to pass SPM for a matter of fact that the level of English of many Malaysians are still not up to standard even for the very easy SPM. The government should first tackle the root of the problem which again is the proficiency of the English language of the citizens of Malaysia.

My point of view may seem very common but I believe it is what many ordinary Malaysians share. Until today, many of the issues mentioned above have been raised but still no actions were taken. Even if there were actions taken, I do not think those actions were of much help. Let me raise a point that we are a developing country. If as a developing country, our citizen’s proficiency of the English language is not up to par with the developed countries then how will we actually be able to achieve Tun Dr Mahathir’s Vision 2020?

Tan Sri,

Last but not least, I sincerely hope that your ministry will look into these matters seriously. I thank you for your patience in reading this letter. My sincere apology if I had made any mistakes in my above writings. Thank you.

Sincerely,

Philip Yong Kee Chung
www.philipyong.net

How Many JPA Scholars Serve Their Bond?

2009-06-07T22:51:00.005+08:00

I've been meaning to post this for the longest time, but somehow never got around to do it. Anyway, there has been plenty of talk on the JPA scholarship (again) recently, and one of the related issues which keep cropping up is whether the talents of our returning(?) scholars are actually being fully "exploited" by the Government.

I have addressed the following question to the Prime Minister in parliament:

...berapa ramai pemegang biasiswa yang telah selesai pengajian pada 5 tahun yang lepas, antara mereka, berapakah yang telah berkhidmat untuk Kerajaan mengikut syarat perjanjian biasiswa, berapakah yang enggan menunaikan perjanjian dan yang telah dilepaskan daripada tanggungjawab mereka.

We obviously know that many of the scholars never served in Government but even I was a little taken abacked by the number who has been released incognito.

Bagi tempoh 5 tahun lepas iaitu 2003-2007, seramai 30,832 pelajar tajaan JPA telah menamatkan pengajian di dalam dan luar Negara. Jumlah ini meliputi pelajar-pelajar yang tamat pengajian di peringkat diploma, ijazah sarjana muda dan sarjana.

Sepanjang tempoh tersebut, seramai 4,920 orang telah berkhidmat dalam pelbagai skim perkhidmatan lantikan SPA. Terdapat juga pelajar-pelajar ini yang sedang berkhidmat di bawah skim perkhidmatan yang dilantik oleh Pihak Berkuasa Melantik yang lain seperti Suruhanjaya Perkhidmatan Pelajaran (SPP), Badan-badan Berkanun dan Pihak Berkuasa Tempatan.

Manakala, seramai 314 bekas pelajar tajaan JPA telah memohon dan dilepaskan daripada kontrak.

Pemegang-pemegang biasiswa yang tidak menunaikan kewajipan mereka, tidak akan dilepaskan dari tanggungjawab dengan sewenang-wenangnya. Tuntutan gantirugi melalui penguatkuasaan syarat perjanjian Biasiswa akan dikenakan ke atas mereka yang ingkar terhadap perjanjian yang telah ditandatangani.

Yes, that means that only 16% of JPA scholars actually serve their bonds upon return to the country over the last 5 years. The remainder? Your guess is as good as mine.

No wonder everyone wants the JPA scholarship, while you sign up with a bond, in practice, you'd rarely have to serve a single day of the contract.

USM 'glitch'

2009-06-01T21:49:00.002+08:00

This is not a good start for USM as the country's first and so far, only, APEX university. A technical 'glitch' resulted in admission 'approvals' being sent to all 8173 students who applied for entry into USM instead of the 3599 who had been accepted into USM. When this error was revealed, many students who at first, had thought that they had been accepted, had to suffer the anguish of disappointment.

I don't really want to put too much heat on USM given that this kind of technical glitch can be easily rectified. I think that the anguish suffered by the students who at first thought that they had been accepted into USM but later found out that they have been rejected is sad but the bigger issue is whether their chances of getting into one of the other public universities will be jeopardized by their USM rejection.

From what I've read, the application process to USM is handled by USM themselves because of their status as the apex university. Of a total of 22,000 applicants, 8173 were 'pre-qualified' to enter USM presumably because of their academic excellence. Out of these 8173 students, only 3599 were admitted.

The process for the students who did not 'pre-qualify' to enter USM (out of the initial 22,000 applicants) seem simple enough. Their applications are submitted to the UPU together with the other applications to gain entry into the other public universities in Malaysia (other than USM). But I'm not so sure if the 4574 students who were rejected by USM (out of the 8173) would be given the same 'fair' shot an getting into the program of their choice in the other public universities especially given the short window span between when USM announces its list of successful entrants and when the other public universities announces theirs (a window of approximately 3 weeks). Higher Education Minister, Khaled Nordin, has made assurances that those rejected by USM will be processed by UPU for consideration for entry into the other public universities but I'm not sure if UPU can do so fairly in a short period of time.

I'm sure these glitches will be ironed out in due time but this is no consolation for those 4574 students who are affected by this. I think more transparency in the process is needed. (I would appreciate any of our readers who are more familiar with the application process for USM as well as for the other public universities to enlighten us)

Perhaps a similar system such as that adopted by Cambridge and Oxford can be used by USM. Those who are interested in applying to Cambridge or Oxford at the undergrad level (you cannot choose both) have to apply directly to either university. At the same time, most students also submit another general application to UCAS to apply to the non-Cambridge / Oxford universities. I don't see why something like that cannot be used in the Malaysian context. Those who want to apply to USM should do so directly. But they should not be prevented from applying to the other public universities through UPU. Once the results are announced by USM as well as the other public universities, applicants can choose which offer to accept. I don't see why it is necessary for the USM 'rejectees' to be subjected to some uncertainty just because they choose to apply to USM. They should be allowed a separate UPU application that is processed together with all the other UPU applications. Sounds reasonable?

Contribute to Recom Wiki

2009-06-01T21:42:00.002+08:00

We always complain that there's nothing we can do to change the education system in Malaysia. I don't think we are as powerless as we think we are. Knowledge empowers us to do more than we think we can. An initiative, the Recom Wiki project, 'relaunched' by Chen Chow is a project that aims to create an online Malaysian Education Encyclopedia. I think it's a really worthwhile project that regular readers of this blog can contribute to especially in their own areas of expertise. Check it out and contribute!

Abolish JPA Undergrad Scholarships?

2009-06-01T21:37:00.002+08:00

Check out Bakri Musa's latest post on the JPA undergrad scholarships. Well worth a read. I wouldn't go so far as to call for the JPA undergrad scholarships to be abolished but I wouldn't mind if the numbers were cut down drastically to only those who gain admission into the best universities overseas and if steps are taken to ensure that these students come back to serve in the public service.

Only 20% of JPA scholarships given on merit?

2009-05-18T20:53:00.002+08:00

Not sure if the thrust of this report in the Malaysian Insider accurately reflects what the PSD DG told the DAP contingent. That 20% of the scholarships are given based on merit seems a bit too low. I'll reproduce the article below in full since Tony is mentioned a few times. I agree with his suggestion that these scholarships should be awarded based on pre-U results such as STPM results instead of SPM results and should more accurately reflect the kinds of universities that these students manage to get accepted into.

Only 20pc of PSD scholarships given on merit
By Shannon Teoh

PUTRAJAYA, May 18 — Only 20 per cent, or one in five, of Public Service Department (PSD) scholarships are given based on merit while the rest are allocated based on racial quotas.

This appears to be a key factor leading to the public outcry over the large number of top-scorers in the Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM), Malaysia's school-leaving exam, not obtaining scholarships to further their studies.

This was revealed when DAP leaders, including its parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang and information chief Tony Pua, met with PSD director-general Tan Sri Ismail Adam today.

Also present was DAP Socialist Youth chief Anthony Loke, who told The Malaysian Insider that Ismail had confirmed that 60 per cent of scholarships were given out based on the population ratio of respective races.

Another 10 per cent is set aside for East Malaysian Bumiputras and the same ratio for underprivileged students.

"This is at odds with what Parliament Minister Datuk Seri Nazri Aziz told the house last year, when he said it would be split according to a 55:45 ratio," Loke said.

The Rasah MP said that there was no way that the current method of allocation could hit that desired ratio.

"This change of policy is why there are more clear-cut cases of qualified students not getting scholarships this year," Loke added.

Ismail had on Saturday asked the public for understanding as there are 8,000 students who qualify on merit but his department had only 2,000 scholarships to allocate.

Lim, in a press conference on Friday, had called for students with nine 1As and onwards to "automatically qualify for scholarships, especially now that the new prime minister has promised to put the people first."

Pua today also called for a total reform of the system, saying that too many high achievers were falling through the net and that pre-university courses such as A-levels or the local equivalent, Sijil Tinggi Pelajaran Malaysia, were a more accurate benchmark for who deserved a scholarship.

"We should change the benchmark to the point when they actually apply to enter university. Then if you do not get accepted into a certain list of universities, there is no argument – you are simply not qualified for a scholarship," he told The Malaysian Insider.

Satu Sekolah Demi Semua

2009-05-18T11:36:00.003+08:00

Here we go again. Yet another campaign to try to pin all of Malaysia's racial problems on vernacular schools. Someone called 'Blog Demi Negara' has started an online petition entitled 'Satu Sekolah Demi Semua'. I'll paste the contents of the petition below and then comment on it.

Sekolah Vernakular (SJKC dan SJKT) adalah punca utama ketidakserasian dan ketegangan kaum di negara kita tercinta.

Fenomena ini adalah unik di dunia ini dan telah menjadi suatu barah yang kian menular dalam kancah kerapuhan masyarakat Malaysia. Jika gejala Sekolah Vernakular ini tidak dibendung, negara kita akan terus bergerak ke ambang kehancuran.

Pengkajian semula sistem pelajaran negara ini haruslah dilakukan memandangkan fenomena perpecahan kaum yang semakin meruncing di masa kini. Gejala ini amatlah jelas sekali di alam siber dimana segelintir masyarakat kini mempamirkan sikap anti-negara yang semakin ketara dan berleluasa. Jelas sekali, anasir-anasir ini tidak menghormati asas dan prinsip perlembagaan negara Malaysia, tiada rasa cinta kepada tanah air dan juga menonjolkan penulisan hasutan yang mencetuskan sentimen perkauman yang begitu ketara sekali.

Secara lantangnya, puak ini mempertikaikan segala unsur yang melambangkan kedaulatan dan intipati negara kita tercinta.

Kami menyeru agar gejala Sekolah Vernakular ini di hapuskan secara total.

Komuniti Demi Negara

Note:-

Satu Sekolah Untuk Semua (SSS) is a grassroot movement to reset one of the key foundations of our nationhood and create the essence of a united and cohesive Malaysia. There is no other way to forge national integration, national unity and to instill a sense of shared destiny except to vigorously push for a streamlined, singular School System for ALL Malaysians.

Every single one of us, of all origin and ethnicity, must speak in one tongue and undergo the same educational journey as Warganegaras of this land. No single Anak Bangsa Malaysia should be allowed to fall into the communal trap laid by selfish, irrational chauvinists and denied the same opportunity as Mainstream Malaysiana. Support SSS for our nation's future. Do sign the petition. Get your family and friends to sign as well. Lets collectively make SSS a reality for the future of our Tanah Air Tercinta.

While I think that we can have a legitimate discussion on the pros and cons of having vernacular schools, I personally think that it is ludicrous to imply that just by getting rid of vernacular schools, we would be able to achieve national unity ala Indonesia or even Singapore, which Rocky seems to imply here.

Having a single language of instruction has not decreased the level of ethnic and religious tension in Indonesia. Nor has it torn down racial barriers sufficiently in the US. Having different languages has not torn apart India as a country.

For sure, having different types of schools with different languages of instruction makes building a strong and cohesive national unity more difficult but it does not make it impossible. Furthermore, it needs to be emphasized again that getting rid of vernacular education is not a panacea towards solving all our racial problems. Indeed, if it is not done alongside other measures which imply racial differences in this country such as the policies associated with the NEP and so on, it will most likely INCREASE racial tensions and unhappiness.

Taking cheap shots at vernacular education in Malaysia is always the easy option out. It's far easier to identify such 'bogeymen' than to do the harder work of improving the state of education in our schools, regardless of the medium of instruction. For example, how do we improve the quality and skill levels of our teachers? How do we try to narrow the urban-rural divide in our education system? How do we improve the level of spoken and written English across all schools, both vernacular as well as sekolah kebangsaan? These are tough challenges and ones which are not easily solved by simplistic petitions and rabble rousing attempts.

Let's have a discussion on these issues instead of making vernacular schools the target.

JPA Scholarships – Seeking A Fair & Equitable Policy

2009-05-15T14:57:00.002+08:00

Read about all the renewed controversy over the JPA scholarships recently? Check out Kian Ming's latest take (of our many takes).

Well, in the light of the neverending controversy over the award of government scholarships by Jabatan Perkhidmatan Awam (JPA) of the Prime Minister's Department, DAP will be holding a forum/dialogue session to obtain feedback from:

aggrieved students
current and former local and overseas scholars
academics
the general public

The forum/dialogue will be held as follows:

JPA Scholarships – Seeking A Fair & Equitable Policy
Venue: KL & Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall
Date: 19th May 2009 (Tuesday)
Time: 8.00 pm

The panelists will include:

Lim Kit Siang, DAP Parliamentary Leader and MP for Ipoh Timor,
Anthony Loke Siew Fook, MP for Rasah and DAPSY Chief,
Tony Pua, MP for Petaling Jaya Utara,
Dr Dzulkifli Ahmad, PAS Research Centre Director and MP for Kuala Selangor
Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, Selangor ADUN for Seri Setia

Dr Goh Cheng Teik, eminent academic, former deputy minister and interviewer for Harvard University admission programme in Malaysia will also be a special guest for the evening.

In addition, for students and scholars who are not able to make it for the forum (e.g., if you are overseas or if you live outstation, you are welcome to submit written submissions to the panel. Please write to: dapscholarship (at) rocketmail (dot) com.

Please forward details of the above forum to all parties concerned, especially those who have failed to secure scholarships despite outstanding results. We will be making a compilation of the complaints, appeals and suggestions made during the evening.

Never ending JPA scholarship 'controversies'

2009-05-14T23:45:00.003+08:00

The latest JPA scholarship results have been announced and not surprisingly, it has been met with howls of protests among the usual quarters, starting with the MCA.

Here are a few links to some newspaper reports that document these protests as well as the JPA's response to these protests. You can access them here, here and here.

Protests and appeals should not be surprising given the limited number of scholarships and the higher number of 'deserving' candidates. But the JPA is not helpless in trying to quell some of these protests.

What the JPA needs to do is the following:

(i) Clarify the objectives of the JPA scholarship

- Is it to give an opportunity for academically excellent Malaysian students to study abroad?
- Is it to create a pool of talented workers who would come back to serve the country in the civil service?
- Is it to reward students from academically disadvantaged backgrounds e.g. from rural areas, from lower class families, from Sabah and Sarawak etc... an opportunity to study abroad?
- Does awarding the local versus the foreign JPA scholarship fulfill different objectives e.g. are those who are academically more gifted awarded the foreign JPA scholarship?
- How important is the racial 'quota' in determining who ultimately gets this scholarship?

Right now, my impression is that the JPA is trying to be all things to all people and trying to fulfill too many fast changing objectives with the awarding of these scholarships.

(ii) Make the criterion for obtaining these scholarships transparent to the public

- Hopefully what this will do is to quell some of the protests. At least if the public knows what these criterion are e.g. to reward students from rural areas, they will understand even if they might not agree with these criteria.

I always feel that more information and transparency is better.

(iii) Have some sort of tracking mechanism to see if these objectives have been met

- For example, JPA could easily track the statistics of different scholarship recipients e.g. % of scholars obtaining places to study in the top universities in the UK or US, graduation rates of scholars with different academic abilities based on their SPM results, % of scholars who return to Malaysia after graduation, % of scholars who return to Malaysia and work for the civil service, etc...
- Using these statistics, the JPA as well as their political masters can decide on whether their objectives have been fulfilled and if not, how the criteria for selection needs to be changed to fulfill these objectives

Right now, most JPA scholars who go abroad either don't come back to Malaysia or if they do, end up working in the private sector which is what they would have done anyways, without the JPA scholarship. Hence, it is a waste of taxpayers money.

My sense is that for this year's JPA scholarship, many more students who did not achieve academically stellar SPM results and who were from rural areas were awarded a disproportionate share of the scholarships while many students who were more academically superior but who are from the urban areas were rejected.

We've blogged about the JPA scholarships many, many times in this blog. I will summarize some of the recommendations which have been put forth here:

(i) Award these scholarships only after these students have applied to and obtained places in foreign universities
(ii) Give priority to those students who have obtained places in some of the top schools in foreign universities based on a pre-approved list of universities
(iii) Bond these students so that they have to return to Malaysia to serve in the civil service

If I were advising the Malaysian government on this matter, I would recommend the following steps:

(i) Refer to the JPA foreign scholarships as the JPA scholarships. Call the local scholarships something else since most of the attention is paid to the places for foreign universities.
(ii) Restrict the number of JPA foreign scholarships so that you can be more selective about who you pick to received these scholarships.
(iii) Create an administrative layer within the civil service that is specifically in charge of 'taking in' these JPA scholars as civil servants so that their skills and expertise can be utilized for the public good
(iv) Allow other GLCs to recruit these JPA scholars but with the caveat that these GLCs have to pay back a certain value of the scholarships (but with a discount) so that the taxpayers' money is accounted for

I would make it absolutely clear that the JPA foreign scholarships will be awarded to the best and the brightest who are willing to come back to serve their country. This way, the JPA scholarships will have a focus instead of trying to be all things to all people.

And hopefully, end some of these always occurring 'controversies' about who is or is not deserving of a JPA foreign scholarship.

Treating students with respect

2009-05-13T01:03:00.004+08:00

Amidst the political turmoil in our country, this little story headlined Student alleges sexual assault by teacher appeared in Malaysiakini. For the benefit of those without a subscription, a Form 2 student claims her male teacher physically assaulted and sexually abused her in front of her classmates—and when she reported it, the discipline teacher told her to keep the matter a secret. She told her parents, who confronted the principal—but the principal claimed the teacher had only scolded the girl for not bringing her Malay grammar book to school.

Sexual and physical abuse is a clearcut issue, so let's talk about a related problem: discipline. I am not opposed to caning in the household or in school; I think used properly, the cane can reinforce a good lesson. But the problem is, caning is difficult to do responsibly. And the reason it is hard to cane responsibly is that it is hard to discipline young people responsibly.

A big problem with expecting schools to enforce discipline is that it is hard to respect children and young adults as people who have their own thoughts and feelings. I've attended many different schools, all of which had their own approaches to discipline. But in almost every case, I think the approach would have been very different if the teachers had been dealing with someone their own age and size, instead of someone younger and smaller than them.

You can argue that young primary schoolchildren need harsh discipline; I am inclined to disagree, but I can accept that. What I cannot accept is the idea that young adults in secondary school still need to be scolded and caned like primary schoolchildren for things like forgetting their books. How is this supposed to reinforce the lesson? These are young adults who are already in a position to think for themselves. If canings and harsh scoldings are supposed to work on young adults, why don't bosses cane their subordinates?

Yes, there are bosses who do yell at their employees, and there are some who even beat them. The latter is illegal, and the former is just bad business. It may be better to be feared than to be loved, but you should at least be feared for the right reasons.

I think a lot about my primary school headmistress when it comes to the question of fear, because everyone in my primary school was deathly afraid of her. I can't remember ever seeing her cane anyone; she never even yelled at anyone. There was just something in her demeanour which told us she meant business, and that she would not look kindly upon anyone who let her down. If you did let her down, you would get a stern talking to from her, but she wouldn't beat you up. She wouldn't shout at you. She would tell you what you had done wrong, and what she expected from you—and you would scurry away, tail tucked firmly between your legs, knowing you never wanted to get another such talk from her again.

The difference is that my headmistress knew that people will respect you when you first respect them (a lesson some politicians on both sides of the aisle could learn). She treated us as responsible people who knew what was right and wrong, even though we were just primary schoolkids. She made us feel shamed, not because we had been punished, but because we had let her and let ourselves down. That is the kind of shame and fear which works. This is why my headmistress was both feared and loved.

Because so many teachers do not understand that fear and love have to go hand-in-hand, we get incidents of teachers beating up and humiliating pupils. While this might work in the short run, it eventually makes school even more unpleasant for students, and makes them even more disinclined to learn.

I am presently reading a book by actor Keith Johnstone—a former teacher who hated school. One fantastic observation Johnstone makes is that we misunderstand the difference between good and bad teachers. Education, he points out, is not a quantity, of which good teachers dole out a lot, and bad teachers only a little. Good teachers, he says, really make you learn. Bad teachers really make you unlearn. This strikes me as true in a variety of ways, but I cannot think of an area where this applies more than discipline. Good teachers give you lessons in discipline which last for life; bad teachers only wind up making you even worse off than you were before.

Delay in Science and Math decision

2009-05-07T10:17:00.004+08:00

Looks like the new Education Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, has decided to defer the decision on whether to continue teaching Science and Math in English until he is "satisfied with the analysis about what are effects from the current policies and what could be improved or if there is a need to amend the policies".

This is part of the same newspaper report by the Malaysian Insider.

“We are looking at some research carried out by a number of independent bodies. They have given me feedback which is not very similar to what the round table discussion that we have. Some round table do not have enough facts and evidences.

“There are a lot of feedback which I think has to be looked at and we are prepared to wait a little bit longer because whatever decision that the government is going to make on this issue is important because we do not want to be seen as a flip flop in terms of administering this issue,” Muhyiddin said.

He added that the Ministry is open to any parties that are willing to share their views on the issue and that he will only decide when the time is right.

“What is important in this stage is that many parties have given their own opinions. Some agreed and others have disagreed. What is important is the future of our national language, the importance of the English language and also the future of our children,” Muhyiddin said.

This issue has been debated ad nauseum and I'm sure that enough trees have been felled and enough coffee drunk over round tables and discussions to give a perfectly healthy man diabetes.

I don't think this is a problem that is particular to the Malaysian political system. In any country with a parliamentary system, when there is a change in not only the Minister in charge of a certain Ministry but also the Prime Minister, it is very likely that the new Minister in question would not just blindly adopt the positions of his predecessor.

In this case, the former Education Minister, Datuk Seri Hishamuddin Hussein, did not make any decision on whether the teaching of Science and Math in English would continue next year. Hence, it is only natural that Muhyiddin would not want to make a quick decision that may be uniformed, at least on his part.

But still, one cannot help but think that at the end of the day, whatever decision that will be made, will come at the expense of the students themselves since this delay will probably lead to delays in possible changes to the curriculum, the textbooks, etc...

This kind of delay almost makes me wish that Muhyiddin and the government of the day will just bite the bullet and make a decision on this and then take the heat from it. Whatever decision they make, there are bound to be some groups who will be unhappy. So might as well bite the bullet sooner rather than later.

School choice in Malaysia

2009-05-07T01:25:00.002+08:00

A major shortcoming of the Malaysian education system is its cookie-cutter style of teaching, which assumes students are homogeneous, have the same learning styles, and learn at the same pace. One solution which is often touted by education reformers in other countries, and one I personally am partial to, is the idea of school choice.

The fundamental idea is to give families a choice of schools besides those in the standard public school system. A common mechanism for accomplishing this is school vouchers: the government gives each family a voucher, which can either be redeemed for a standard public school education, or at a private school. Another such mechanism is charter schools — schools funded like public schools, but more like private schools in terms of autonomy and freedom to operate. (Charter schools are funded by the central government, but held accountable by the local government or another entity which sponsors the charter.) Both have been implemented to some degree in many other countries; New Zealand in particular has completely switched over to charter schools for its public school system.

The BBC has a brief and interesting piece on school vouchers in Sweden. I have brought up the idea of school choice on this blog before, but many people dismissed it as unstructured and giving schools too much autonomy to operate. As the Swedish example shows, school choice doesn't mean removing government from the picture. The government sets out some fundamental requirements from schools, and sets schools free to accomplish these requirements however they wish. If we were to have school choice in Malaysia, we could well still have standardised exams -- schools would still be required to perform according to set metrics.

One last, brief word on school choice: although I have never been a fan of the Chinese school system, a reason I think they work so well (compared to other public schools) is because they are run like charter schools. Chinese schools are primarily accountable to the communities they serve, and are relatively free from government interference in how they are run. Each school thus has some distinct character to it, and does things differently -- and this positive competition thus not only leads to better schools overall, but also caters to a broader spectrum of people than the standard, homogeneous national schools.

Exams no longer final word on assessment?

2009-04-21T04:01:00.003+08:00

Much appreciation to Firdaus, who in the comments of Kian Ming's post on the new Deputy Education Minister pointed us to the news that the UPSR and potentially PMR and SPM too will no longer be the last word on pupils' performance. This is a dramatic change in our education system, and it seems to be new Education Minister Muhyiddin Yassin's attempt to make his mark.

Unfortunately, I don't think we have enough information on this policy change to draw conclusions regarding its worthiness. In the abstract, it's a good enough idea: the notion that two or three exams should forever define your school years is ridiculous, because even in our mostly dreary education system, you get so much out of school beyond just knowing how to pass exams.

But even when I was in school, it was understood that the UPSR, PMR and SPM were not the be-all and end-all: you had to do well on the tests and exams routinely meted out in school too. Of course, they weren't as important as the big three — I actually failed a couple of tests when I was in school, and it didn't ruin my life — but you were expected to do well because they were basically dry runs for whatever exam the school was prepping you for. In primary school, tests and exams were dry runs for the UPSR; in secondary school, they became preparation for the PMR and SPM.

So if the new policy is just incorporating these tests and exams into the final assessment, then not much really changes. The assessment is still fundamentally testing only one trait: how well you can take the exams designed by the Education Ministry. Unless you change how we actually design the exams, this is purely a cosmetic change. The only useful and meaningful difference will be that if you fall sick during a major exam, your grades won't be as bad as they were before. The assessment system will still tell us nothing about how well our pupils can think or analyse information — all it will tell us now is whether our pupils can consistently take exams and answer the preset questions correctly over the course of six years, instead of one or two months.

Special Birthday Dedication to Ms Liew

2009-04-19T23:12:00.004+08:00

This post is from Gabrielle and it is dedicated to a very special teacher by the name of Ms Liew. I think after reading this, we will all agree that we need more teachers like Ms Liew.

Today (April 19) is Ms Liew’s birthday, and this note is dedicated to her. (from Gabrielle Chong)

Back in secondary school, I hated Teacher’s Day. I hated the extravagant celebrations in my humid school hall. I hated the pretentious song dedications. I hated the students’ awful, half-baked attempts at performing, err, titillating pop dances (it was an all-girls school). Most of all, I hated the fact that while the entire school of over a hundred teachers and over two thousand students would sit down comfortably inside the hall to savor the show, the one teacher that I loved most happened to be the discipline teacher, and she would spend every Teacher’s Day (and Report Card Day, and Graduation Day, and ABC Teacher’s Retirement Day, and…) breaking out in sweat, manning the school compound, singling out troublemakers and catching truants. The hardest working teacher in school, working even harder on Teacher’s Day.

The first thing you will notice about Ms Liew is her tall, slim figure, partly due to God-given slim genes, and partly due to fact she has little time to eat. The second thing you will notice about her is her gauntness (sorry lah if you are reading this, Ms Liew!), the accumulated consequence of over two decades of labour from the heart. The third thing you will notice about her, if she opens her mouth, is her crisp, clear, ferocious yet comical voice, which can either reduce even the most defiant delinquent in school to tears, or drive a whole hall of students roaring in laughter.

Witty, sporting and outgoing, Ms Liew was one of the most popular teachers in school. But the students who claimed a special place in her heart were the outcasts: troubled teens, antisocial youths, school rebels and failing students. As much she came down hard on school hooligans, she worked even harder to bring them back within the embrace of the school community. She gave her care to the students who least deserved it, because they needed it most.

Ms Liew was stern, for sure. When the school received complaints from the public that truants were patronising various restaurants in school uniforms, she drove around the school, alone, early in the mornings to round the truants up. And when she scolds you in her trademark crisp, clear, ferocious tone, you would feel your hair standing on it edges. But she also had sneakier ways of changing people’s lives. If she decided that you looked troubled, she would take painstaking efforts to chat you up after school to get to know you better as a person. If she thought that you were isolated and defiant, she would rope you in for cheerleading and other activities so that you would feel involved as a part of the school community. There was also an occasion when she convinced a group of problematic students to take part in a Teacher’s Day performance and give roses to the teachers with whom they usually were on bad terms. The experience transformed everyone a little bit, both the teachers and the students.

In 2007, I successfully nominated Ms Liew for Teacher Idol, a Teacher’s Day tribute organised by The Star. When reporters and photographers from The Star came to take a photo of her, Ms Liew went to the ‘weak’ Arts classes to gather students for the photo shoot. The thrilled students rushed out and carried Ms Liew in the air. The photo was never published, but I understood what Ms Liew wanted to do. She wanted the ‘weak’ students, who never get to enjoy five minutes of fame as straight A students, have their chance in getting the slightest bit of recognition.

A friend of mine, from another school, once told me the tragic story of two girls in her alma mater who were constantly abused by their father. They finally snapped one day, and engaged their boyfriends to murder him. The two boys were sent to prison, while the girls were sent to a rehabilitation center. I sometimes think that if they had a Ms Liew in their school, tragedies like that would never happen - observant Ms Liew would have singled the solemn-looking girls out for counselling and discover their problems. Or rather, if there were Ms Liews in every school, the world would improve by leaps and bounds.

There were, of course, times when Ms Liew had her fair share of hardcore delinquents who did not budge at kindness. There were vengeful students who tried to intimidate her with mockery and vandalizing her car. But after stern disciplinary action was taken in each of those incidents, there was always, always room for forgiving and reconciliation. Today, countless ex-students return to my alma mater year after year to visit the teacher who had made such a profound impact on their lives.

Ms Liew was my school discipline teacher for many years (she has since been promoted to other positions), but her stint at my alma mater covered many other roles which she performed simultaneously. Among other things, she was the legendary teacher-advisor of the prefectorial board, the English team debate coach, the choral speaking coach (she wrote the script for the team every year), and the default co-ordinator for every major school event. In a nutshell, she was the backbone of an entire school.

I first interacted with her when I was in Form One, but only began seeing her regularly in when I was in Form Three as one of her prefects. At that time, I was still an angry, highly aggressive, defiant teen who had quarrelled with probably half the school’s teacher and student body.

One day, I yelled at a teacher right in front of a whole class so badly that I reduced her to tears (it was sparked by a petty quarrel over her insisting that I make my personal notes in pencil and not pens). I thought that that marked the end of my stint in the prefectorial board and the start of even greater contempt by the school towards me. I expected a heavy lashing by Ms Liew. She did see me eventually, but she never raised her voice at me, nor did she strip me of my position. I later apologized to the teacher that I had scolded. If there was one thing I learned from Ms Liew, it was redemption.

In Form Four, I conjured the courage to write her a 9-page letter one day, with a full list of questions on religion, existentialism, ethics and morality. These were the questions that had brought me a decade of weird stares, isolation and reputation as a weirdo in a conservative, Chinese school environment. Ms Liew met me for a chat in the office one day to reply my questions in that letter. From that day onwards, I no longer felt like an outcast.

Ms Liew had her quirky ways of teaching her students. Once, she told the debaters to research a topic over the weekend in preparation for a practice debate in front of a class. When that day arrived, she gave us our motion an hour before we were due to hold our debate. The motion was entirely different from the topic she had asked us to research, and we suddenly found ourselves with impromptu public speaking skills that we never knew we had.

Another memorable incident occurred during one of the prefectorial board outdoor camps. While going on a night hike one day on Pangkor Island, Ms Liew sneaked up behind us, grabbed the last prefect in the single file and brought her back to the base camp. Amazingly, no one realized that she was missing. When head counts were made back at the base, everyone was traumatized by the knowledge that one of our fellow friends was missing. Ms Liew brought out the ‘missing girl’ a few hours later, and we had a good lesson on accountability and responsibility for others.

My six years of friendship with Ms Liew was never a smooth one. We had our vast ideological differences, and we constantly feuded over disagreements on religious, sexuality and various social issues as well as personal matters, but none of these disagreements were ever severe enough to destroy our bond.

Like all cool teachers, Ms Liew was renowned for her raunchy sense of humour as much as for her intellect. She used to brag that she gave sizzling lessons on reproduction while serving as a biology teacher at an all-boys school. “We even discussed whether cats have orgasms”, she smirked. Another time, when she introduced a new, male teacher trainee into the school, she remarked to an entire hall of students, “We have a new teacher today, and he’s a guy…I can already hear your hormones raging.” In addition, Ms Liew was the first liberal intellect that I knew in my life. After entering the debate team in Form Four, she lent me her stack of socioeconomics, history and political books - the first time I had access to a huge pile of advanced reading material (that was how I felt back then), and which later spurred my interest in those fields.

As an undergraduate student, Ms Liew studied biochemistry. But after some soul-searching, she decided that teaching was her true calling instead. She was, as a Sixth Form student at St Michael’s Institution, inspired by a missionary named Brother Paul who left home at a young age to serve as a teacher in a strange tropical land half the globe away from his country. My mother, who used to loiter around St Michael’s Institution as a child, remembered Brother Paul as a kind man who gave sweets to the poor children in that area and gathered them for Biblical story-telling sessions. To this day, Ms Liew still visits the grave of the man who taught her a life of service every year.

Ms Liew’s life outside the school is no less remarkable. She brought up two lovable Dennis the Menace-lookalikes as if they were her own children. She was friends with the school janitors, the laboratory assistants and the canteen aunties. When one of her Liew’s colleagues and best friend started having difficulties walking, she volunteered to drive her to and back from work every single day. By the time I graduated, she had been doing that continuously for six years. There are so many other heart achingly beautiful anecdotes about Ms Liew that I would love to share, but it would be impossible to do so without intruding into the personal life of a highly private and humble person. Hence, I will just conclude by testifying that she was so much more than a dedicated teacher; she was also a filial daughter, a caring foster mother, a steadfast friend, a humble intellectual, a perpetual optimist and a faithful Christian. Some people excel at ping pong. Others excel at making cheesecakes. Ms Liew excels at living.

Ironically, Ms Liew never taught me for a single minute in class - I never had the fortune of having her as a subject teacher. And yet, she has taught me more about life than I could ever learn.

New Deputy Minister reaches out via FB

2009-04-17T19:22:00.004+08:00

Read this story on the Star about how the new Deputy Higher Education Minister, Saifuddin Abdullah, is using facebook to reach out to his 'constituents'.

The Star reported that:

"University students who wish to bring up grievances regarding their tertiary institutions can do so by directly contacting Deputy Higher Education Minister Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah through Facebook. Datuk Saifuddin said that he will be live on the social networking website on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, from 10 to 11 pm."

I applaud the new Deputy Minister for Higher Education for using the internet and social networking sites such as facebook to reach out to students at the tertiary level. I'm a little bit more skeptical as to how effective going 'live' on facebook will be since the chat function on FB isn't really very good.

I think the new Deputy Minister deserves close attention. I've been aware of him ever since M Bakri Musa wrote a review about a book Saifuddin had written entitled: Politik Baru: Mematangkan Demokrasi Malaysia. English version: New Politics: Towards A Mature Malaysian Democracy.

Back then, Saifuddin was the Deputy Minister for Entrepreneur and Cooperative Development, a ministry which no longer exists after the announcement of Najib's new cabinet.

A cursory google search reveals that Saifuddin has been an active blogger since August 2008 and also maintains a website. His profile page mentions that he is a UM graduate and an MCKK boy.

Not many ministers or cabinet ministers in Malaysia would know or heard of C K Prahalad but Saifuddin not only mentions Pralahad in one of his blog entries but seems to also have read one of his books. (He mentions Prahalad in the context of promoting entrepreneurialism among university students)

While the Minister of Higher Education is still Khaled Nordin, whom I've not been terribly impressed by, it gives me some hope that he has an able deputy in someone like Saifuddin. He's off to a good start. Let's see if his position as Deputy Minister for Higher Education will translate into any substantive changes in terms of policy in our public and private universities.

A New Education Minister: More of the Same?

2009-04-10T03:51:00.004+08:00

So our Prime Minister has reshuffled his Cabinet, and our new Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin is now also our new Education Minister. Unfortunately, my sense of things is that this probably will not mark a significant change in direction for Malaysian education.

Datuk Hishammuddin Hussein didn't really turn things around, if you ask me; Kian Ming is impressed by his administrative competency and I would agree that he probably kept things from getting worse. But I think it is very hard to say that things improved under Hisham. The government took some very tentative steps towards tinkering with the school system, but nearly every complaint that held water five years ago is still valid today.

I am not optimistic about Muhyiddin because the Education Ministry seems to have become a political football; you often become Education Minister because you're expected to eventually become Prime Minister, and this certainly seems to be true in this case. There is still little sign that the government recognises what's wrong with our school system, let alone how to fix these problems.

The number one issue which Muhyiddin must address is that of teachers: they are overworked, underpaid, poorly trained, and mostly powerless. There is no incentive for bright people to enter the teaching profession, and even those who are selfless enough to serve barely earn enough to cope, especially in urban areas. Teachers are often expected to not only teach, but handle paperwork and take on administrative duties. Yet, they barely get much training, and they are so shackled by the system that they are assigned to posts that make no sense; it is unusually common for a science teacher to wind up teaching history, for example. Fortunately, this is beside the point, because teachers have no power to determine the curriculum; what they teach has already been decided by a handful of bureaucrats and Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka textbook authors, and they are just responsible for vomiting up whatever these people want them to say, so their pupils can dutifully do the same on their exams.

There are a lot of other wrong things with our education system, but all my experiences in the school system point to teaching as the main problem: we aren't treating our teachers right. And when we don't properly treat these mature adults who we actually pay to be in school, is it really surprising that we often treat our students and youth even worse? We have good teachers, but we don't trust them to teach. We have good students, but we don't trust them to learn. Is it then surprising that so few people in our schools want to teach or learn?

When you empower the good teachers, you also empower the good students. I just finished watching this fantastic lecture on molecular biology which illustrates this perfectly; the speaker is a Princeton University biologist who not only loves her field, but lectures clearly and explains obscure concepts in a simple way. And if you watch the whole way through, she gives credit to all the students who work in her lab, because everything she presented was first discovered by one of them: "when you learn things like about how the natural world works ... it was done by a child. Science is done by that demographic."

It is hard to imagine a Malaysian academic saying something like that, and that says a lot about the way we think about education. We have trouble with giving academics freedom, and we have trouble with giving students freedom. This is unquestionably true in primary and secondary school, where the curriculum is completely dictated by the state and federal governments, but almost as true in our universities, where faculty and students are less free to speak their minds than any ordinary member of the public.

When you get to the heart of it, the problem with Malaysian education is that we are afraid of setting our people free, to explore our world. The attitude of our modern education system and our modern education policymakers is that minds are something to be controlled, not freed. And for all the talk of reform on the part of our new Prime Minister — and even his two predecessors, both of whom promised scores of reforms in their own times — none have dared address this problem which cuts to the core of the rotten apple that is our education system. Certainly, the new Education Minister is no exception to this rule. Until someone in government recognises this, I will have a very tough time believing there will be any kind of meaningful change in our school system.

Allocation of JPA scholarships

2009-03-28T04:46:00.002+08:00

Read this Bernama piece in the Star today about 20% of PSD scholarships being set aside for bumiputra students in Sabah and Sarawak. The Minster in question, Bernard Dompok, Minister in the PM's office said that "under the new PSD scholarship scheme, 20 percent or 400 of the 2,000 scholarships offered this year were for excellent students and 60 per cent or 1,200 scholarships were for bumiputra and non-bumiputra SPM leavers nationwide. He said the remaining 10 percent were for disabled students who excelled in their studies." Not really sure how the 20% of 'excellent' students are different from the other SPM students elsewhere except perhaps to say that these 'excellent' students may have better extra curricular records and activities than those who scored better academically. Let me dig up more information on the changes in the JPA scholarships policy and write another lengthier post later.

Tok Pa for Minister for Higher Education

2009-03-27T17:52:00.002+08:00

OK, one final note from the UMNO GA and we can move on. Since Khaled Nordin, the current Minister for Higher Education, failed to win one of the 3 VP positions and since there will be a cabinet reshuffle coming up soon, I'm going to publicly state my support for Tok Pa or Mustapha Mohamed, to be given back the cabinet position of Minister for Higher Education. I've always had more praise than criticism for Tok Pa during his time as Minister for Higher Education and I hope that his skills and intellect will once again be used to improve the state of our public and private universities and colleges in Malaysia.

Appoint UMNO loyalists

2009-03-27T09:06:00.002+08:00

I knew that it was going to be a challenge to keep the UMNO elections out of this blog. Check out this quote from an UMNO delegate:

Musa’s call was also echoed by a Malacca delegate, Datuk Hasnoor Husin, who also urged the government to ensure that only Umno loyalists be appointed to senior positions in public universities. “Please make sure the faculty members are all Umno men, and the same goes for other civil servants,” said Hasnoor. He cited the example of UiTM vice chancellor Datuk Seri Ibrahim Abu Shah who was a party loyalist.

I leave you guys to comment.

Not Enough PhD Applicants

2009-03-22T09:27:00.003+08:00

A couple of weeks back, I blogged about how the mini-budget / stimulus package provides for an additional 10,000 places for Masters level courses and 500 places for aspiring PhD candidates in public universities as well as at Uniten, Multimedia University and UTP.

A week after this announcement, on March 17th, Bernama reported that only 16 people had applied for places in the PhD programs. On March 22nd, the Deputy Minister for Higher Education announced that less than 100 applications had been received.

In a typical university in the US, the ratio of applications to places is about 30 to 1 for most programs. This means that if there are 10 spots open, there should be 300 applications for this program. Some PhD programs like Economics will have more. Some, like Romance Studies, will have fewer.

With so few applicants, our public universities should be worried if they can actually find good enough candidates to fill these places. If they can't, typically what will happen is that these spots will go to overseas candidates. This is not necessarily a bad thing but one needs to find out and understand why there are so few local candidates in the first place. Especially since the number of people who want to do PhDs in a developing country like Malaysia should be increasing.

Politicising Education

2009-03-18T14:52:00.005+08:00

No, this isn't about the issue of teaching science and maths in English — an issue where I slightly disagree with Kian Ming's take, by the way — but more on that later. This is about the authorities cracking down on opposition politicians who participate in events organised by students in their schools, colleges and universities. The government claims to recognise that to nurture the freedom of thought and inquiry necessary for a good education, academics and students need the freedom to explore a variety of different viewpoints, but then why does it persist in throwing up all kinds of obstacles when students invite opposition politicians attend their events?

A couple of days ago, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad — a PKR state assemblyman in Selangor who, for the sake of full disclosure, is a friend of mine — was invited by the Persatuan Mahasiswa Islam Universiti Malaya (Muslim Students Association of the University of Malaya) to officiate at an event they sponsored. Of course, Nik Nazmi ran into all sorts of difficulties when he tried to attend, and eventually had to be smuggled into the campus riding on a student's motorcycle. You can get the full story from Nik's blog and Malaysiakini (Malay).

This is of course not anything new. Not too long ago, it was DAP state assemblywoman Hannah Yeoh who complained she couldn't even attend an event held by her old secondary school's Prefects Association — when she herself had been head prefect once.

The government often claims it just does not want education to be politicised, but the way this implicit policy is enforced, it often seems that the government really wants education politicised in its favour. When I was in school, the administrators never shrank from inviting local politicians — always Barisan Nasional politicians — to attend and officiate at school events.

What's obvious is that when you give people in power the authority to ban people from campuses because they are political, you basically give them the power to ban almost anyone they like. Unless you have perfectly unbiased human beings in power — people who actually honestly want to keep education depoliticised and are completely just about doing it — bad things will happen.

And what's often overlooked is that education is itself political; there's no running away from this. We as a society collectively have a stake in how we bring up our children and what kind of citizens our schools create. And you don't need a political scientist to tell you that when society has a collective stake in something, you need some sort of political system to work things out.

So I think exposing students to politics is actually a fantastic thing; what's important is that they get the full picture, and not just the picture which one interest group wants them to see. Schools and student societies should be free to invite just about anyone to their events. The important thing is to promote a culture of questioning and critical discussion; students shouldn't blindly accept whatever any politician tells them. I would hope that at the event he attended, Nik Nazmi got peppered with questions from students about why he believes what he does. That should be the whole point of organising events with politicians.

There is no reason to arbitrarily depoliticise education, when education is supposed to make you a good citizen, which requires you to know something about politics. If you're worrying that your students will be misled by politicians because they blindly accept anything they hear, then your real problem is that you haven't nurtured the right values in them. That's what we should be trying to fix, instead of worrying about politicians speaking to the students who will one day themselves be voters, if not politicians.

The Benefits of Education Fairs

2009-03-17T15:04:00.005+08:00

I've always liked the idea of education fairs even though I've not had the opportunity to attend one in the recent past. Since someone asked me to plug an upcoming education fair for postgrads (more on this later), I thought that I'd sit down and write a few words on why I think education fairs are a good thing, on the whole.

1) Education fairs are "free", at least for the attendees who are looking to find out more about the schools and programs which they are interested in. The people who foot the bill are the organizers of these fairs and the exhibitors who participate in them. This is only fair since the organizers profit from putting these fairs together and the exhibitors profit for marketing their courses to their potential 'clients' i.e. the students and parents who make up most of the attendees.

2) Education fairs are a one stop shop to gather the necessary information on the courses and schools which one is interested in. Of course, a lot of this information should be available on line but there's nothing like the process of being able to compared the different course offerings between the different schools in an education fair. Furthermore, students who have questions about specific details which are not available online can use this opportunity to ask the marketing reps from each school. If the marketing reps cannot answer these questions, they should be able to point the student to someone within that organization who CAN answer those questions.

One also needs to remember that not all kids have internet access at home or in schools and hence the ability to do the necessary online research to find out more about these course, especially kids from rural areas and from less fortunate backgrounds. These education fairs are a great opportunity for them to find out more about different schools and programs.

3) Education fairs are not only useful for potential students but also for the parents of these students. I know that sometimes parents can be overbearing and some even try to dictate the course which their kid or kids should take. Nonetheless, if parents and their kids have a good understanding in terms of expectations on both sides, education fairs can be very helpful venues where parents as well as their children find out more about the courses of interest.

4) Education fairs are also a good venue for students and parents to find out more about schools and colleges which they would otherwise not know about. Most students and parents are aware of the 'big names' like Sunway and HELP and INTI and so on but there may be smaller schools which offer programs that are more suitable for certain students or be more affordable to some students. Of course, one needs to do the proper due diligence when looking at some of the smaller schools but I won't prejudge small and not so well known schools because some of them may actually have very dedicated lecturers in certain niche fields.

5) Education fairs should also be a place where students get to interact with former alumni and current students of some of these schools. Ideally, the exhibitors should not only send out marketing people to 'man' their booths but also include former and current students in their marketing strategy. After all, who better to give first hand information to potential students than former and current students? I particularly like what Chen Chow and his team have done in the past to promote US universities by encouraging former and current students to 'man' the exhibition booths representing their respective universities.

In light of these benefits of education fairs, I'd like to draw attention to an upcoming post-grad education fair that I was asked to plug. Most of us are aware of undergraduate fairs but fewer of us are aware of postgraduate or graduate education fairs. I was made aware that there was such a fair that took place in January of this year at the Mid Valley Exhibition Center and that there will be such a fair taking place again in September 2009. This event is organized by AIC, an exhibition and events organizer in Malaysia and for the January event, it was co-located with jobstreet.com, one of the leading job search sites in South East Asia.

I think this is a good time for potential students to think about postgraduate / graduate education in Malaysia as well as overseas. Some people may want to take a break from work, some people may want to take advantage of the fact that the economy is slowing to do a postgrad / grad degree, some people may want to increase their expertise in certain fields of study etc...

It's probably a good time for universities, both local and overseas, to recruit potential students as well given the current economic conditions as well as some of the recent financial incentives for students to further their education in a local public institution.

Of course, students and parents should attend these fairs with their eyes wide open and do as much background research as possible before attending these fairs. It will make the experience a much more beneficial one.

P.S. Just to reiterate again, none of us (Tony, John or myself) receive any 'benefits' in return for promoting these education fairs.

Science and Math in English - Writing on the Wall

2009-03-15T20:42:00.003+08:00

I wrote this in December of last year - "I suspect that a compromise decision may be made. Either continue teaching S&M in English at the secondary school level or start after Primary 3."

A recent piece by the Malaysian Insider - written by Leslie Lau, who has strong links to BN leaders, had this to say - The government is likely to scrap the policy of using English to teach science and mathematics in primary schools while maintaining it for secondary schools. Education Ministry sources told The Malaysian Insider today that the compromise in policy will be recommended to the Cabinet for a final decision soon in an effort to resolve a controversy which has been brewing for months.

Frankly, I would have liked the policy to continue and improve on its implementation. Now we are in a half way house where neither side is really happy and students and teachers continue to be confused. No one wins.

Stimulus package for postgrad students

2009-03-11T21:07:00.003+08:00

One area affected by the mini-budget or stimulus package that was announced yesterday is postgraduate education in Malaysia. All the details are not out yet but here are some of my preliminary thoughts based on the following Star report.

This is what the DPM who is also the Finance Minister and will soon by our PM said:

Deputy Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said it would finance tuition fees and research grants up to RM20,000 for every student pursuing a PhD locally and RM10,000 for students pursuing a Master’s programme.

“A total of 500 places at PhD level and 10,000 at Masters level in public universities as well as at Universiti Tenaga Nasional, Multimedia University and Universiti Teknologi Petronas will be offered,” he said.

The Higher Education Minister had this to add:

Higher Education Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Khaled Nordin was happy that the stimulus package took into the consideration the needs and problems faced by fresh graduates during the current economic slowdown.

“Not only are there several schemes for unemployed graduates, the Government is also helping them further their studies by providing financial aid,” he said at the Parliament lobby.

Right off the bat, I want to state that I am not against increasing the number of postgraduate students in Malaysia. In fact, this is probably a necessary step if we want to increase the R&D capacity in our country. But there are a few caveats here, caveats which I have discussed before in previous posts. These include - having a sufficient number of professors who can teach and guide these postgrad students and having a selection process that is rigorous enough such that only well-qualified students are admitted into these postgrad programs.

The remarks of the Higher Education minister do not inspire confidence in me. It seems to me that he sees the increase in the number of postgrad places in our public universities as a way to decrease graduate unemployment. In fact, his remarks seem to imply that these scholarships should be given to unemployed graduates!

In any economic downturn, especially in the US context, a larger number fresh graduates will opt to go to graduate school because the opportunity costs associated with grad school is lower - fewer high paying jobs under current market conditions and so on. But many of these students, especially those who can get into the top graduate programs, would have found a job if they didn't choose to go to grad school albeit one which may not meet their high expectations. These are not students who go to grad school because the alternative would be unemployment.

Perhaps the Higher Education Minister was quoted out of context but it really does seem to me that he doesn't 'get' postgrad degrees. He may really think that it's a good solution to solve unemployment in the country. If these students cannot get a job in the private sector or in government, why not ship them off to do postgrad degrees which we i.e. the taxpayer will foot the bill for?

At least the Education Minister seems to 'get' the picture a little bit better:

Meanwhile, Education Minister Datuk Seri Hishammuddin Tun Hussein said the 1,000 additional posts for graduate teachers, who would be hired on contract, would enable the ministry to address the shortage of teachers in certain sectors.

These teachers will be put to productive use, hopefully, in areas where there are teacher shortages, both geographically as well as by subject. The academic 'bar', so to speak, may not be as high as that needed for a PhD student.

The costs associated with selecting a large group of students who are unsuitable for PhD programs are far greater to the taxpayer as well as in terms of human resource management. There may be high drop out rates, dropping of standards to allow sub-par students to obtain their PhDs, frustrated PhD students who are not well guided by their professors, etc...