KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 18 — Lim Kit Siang today demanded that all federal ministers and their deputies come clean on whether they send their children and grandchildren to public schools, claiming that there is no evidence to show that top Barisan Nasional leaders actually support the national education system.

The senior DAP leader said it was quite a boast for deputy Prime Minister and Education Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, to claim that the Malaysian education system was better than that of the United States, Britain and Germany, when he does not ask the Umno General Assembly to endorse his claim.

Citing his old rival and former Prime Minister, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Lim said it was an open secret that cabinet ministers have for a long time sent their children to private and international schools where English is the teaching medium.

“It is true is that the problem of lack of confidence in the BN national education system and policy is now even more serious than in the past, and undoubtedly, there are more Umno/BN Ministers and leaders who are sending their children to private and international schools, locally or abroad, at present than during Mahathir’s time,” Lim said in a statement.

Lim stressed that education was one of the key reasons for voters’ loss of confidence in the ruling BN coalition, a point that was recently reinforced by former Finance Minister Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah.

The Gelang Patah MP echoed Razaleigh’s sentiments that the federal government had spent billions of ringgit on the education system for naught, as Malaysian youths continue to lag far behind their peers in other Asian countries such as China, Singapore and South Korea.

Last week, Razaleigh said the amount of money spent on the country’s education system did not commensurate with the poor performance of Malaysian students when compared to other countries with equal income or purchasing power.

The Kelantan prince pointed to two international benchmarks — the TIMMS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) and PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) in Science, Mathematics and reading — to back his argument.

In TIMMS, Malaysian students slid from a score of 520 in 1999 to 440 in 2001 for mathematics, while the country experienced a similar drop from 510 in 2003 to 426 in 2011 for science, he said.

Despite the dismal figures, education expenditure has progressively gone up with 21 per cent of the 2014 Budget or RM54.6 billion set aside for the Education Ministry and up by nearly RM2 billion to RM56 billion under next year’s federal budget.

Lim today said this is one of the main issues that the coming Umno General Assembly should focus on and find a solution to dislodge Malaysia from the bottom rung of countries in terms of academic excellence, instead of resorting to “histrionics” and “hysterics” in calling for the closure of vernacular schools.

“Malaysia may have achieved the notoriety of having spent most on education in terms of ratio to gross domestic product but yet having the least confidence in the national education system among the country’s government and political leadership,  including Ministers and Deputy Ministers, whose children opt out of the national education system,” he said.