SEPTEMBER 18 — Typical Malaysian public school students may be baffled when told the world is a sphere filled three-fourths by water or asked about the relationship between colonial powers and their subjects, but they are world class when it comes to gaming things.
The result being; they don’t want to know anything, they just want good grades.
Life is a game, honesty-integrity-values are catchphrases only to be used as answers in exam papers, and they perfect it in the Malaysian schools system. The central catalyst is the Malaysian national examinations, which have been consciously compromised for decades. Our children have simply become Machiavelli’s angels.
The result being; they don’t want to think about the world, they just want to rest in any lap of luxury the world must offer them.
The unwillingness of all those connected to the system to reveal the ugly truth has to do with the need not to jeopardise self-interest: For boarding schools get their spectacular results unfettered; day school kids flood tuition centres or orbit tutors with the “secret formula” and receive in exchange As; parents proud of their young one’s grades but clueless about the child’s intelligence or aptitude stay aloof and brag on; ministry officials parading year on year improvements signalling a stellar system on the rise do not feel at fault for collapsing aptitude scores; and ministers not wanting to affect meaningful change by gambling their political capital because their own children are assured of foreign tertiary education despite a sluggish time in school.
The UPSR leak is not the tip of an iceberg of deceit, it is part of a larger and continuing state of gamesmanship which many have learnt to exploit and not object to.
Most candidates welcome without hesitation “special sheets” which actually are the exam papers or close simulation of them, but when others get it and not them throw a massive tantrum or via their parents.
I fear that even some present day politicians in their own schooling days have been complicit. Their As have been the foundation in which their own ascension followed.
The papers
Why are questions repeated with only small alterations? Why are teachers slashing out chapters from already thin syllabus so that students can really study/memorise a series of permutations of the same questions? Why are students travelling last minute to special expensive classes to get those hot tips? Why do these centres have the hot tips?
If the education ministry is loathe to investigate these and right the infractions, when they have gone on for years, how can anyone be convinced they are serious about education now? Are we too cynical to assume their newfound zeal to plug the leak and punish wrongdoers is driven by public condemnation of the scale of abuse?
Schools
There are no marks for scintillating discourse in the classroom. A precocious mind is unnecessary, while subservience is met with an approving nod.
Some might observe that this is unimportant, but surely they cannot be indifferent when students are treating schools as day-care centres and wait for their tuition teachers to zero in for them the exam questions?
School attendance for those in examination years — UPSR and STPM — drop, nose dive closer to exam season as parents and students agree the chances of good scores are improved by focussing on beating the examination at home and at tuition centres.
Schools appear to be in agreement too, by what I gather speaking to both teachers and senior staffers.
Parents
The public schools system is on the verge and parents are the last line of defence, as they have the most to lose.
But they cannot be myopic. While middle-class parents gear up their children to circumvent the system — to ensure their kids progress to tertiary education — they are assisting in the murder of education in schools.
Assessments are inevitable and not all students will have the same academic future after being measured and weighed aptitude-wise.
But the Malaysian examinations today are not about aptitude per se, they are worryingly about repetition, rote learning and willingness to play the game. So while parents want the best for their children, the reduced learning environment our schools are in presently would mean that our products will be less competent on the average when they enter the global tertiary market and thereafter job market.
Smart kids are likelier to successfully manoeuvre the course, but the course is not likely to improve them. They are being short-changed in the system presently.
This will become even more acute as the improvements of the systems in developed nations and other rising nations are increasingly palpable.
Parents will know at dinner time if their children are learning anything meaningful or if their intellectual curiosities are being piqued.
The thing is, parents have to stop being obsessed with the grades a failing system is churning out and demand more education in the campuses where their children are spending the majority of their daily lives in. When they are being educated, then grades will follow in any examination system they choose to participate in later. They’ll be better people taking academic and life examinations.
The mind-set has to shift, because all governments will give in to demanding parents — they just have to stop being tempted by the As pouring out of the education ministry’s public relations factory.
In a corner in Cheras
In an economically stagnant area of Cheras there is a tuition centre. It chooses to have small classes so better teacher-student ratio, enrolling the weaker students that are often omitted from other centres because they do not want their scoring rates to drop, operating with no education tips or predictions and surprisingly avoids weekend classes because it believes children should have lives.
It has students with good scores and then a bunch with average results, but almost always all the students are performing better than they have in the past. It believes that education has to give individuals purpose and hope, and character has a place in any learning space.
I know this because my brother runs it, and spends his weekends playing sports with many of the students. He helped kids who could not manage arithmetic in Form Two to passing the SPM mathematics paper without “unacceptable” advantages.
I am unsure that if most of the centre’s products will be setting the Malaysian corporate, professional and academic world alight but most of them have had their attitude to learning change.
This country could do with more of that. Because I know that those boys and girls are unlikely to be part of the problem, and perhaps they can be part of the solution.
Rethink this exam question
Our blinkered and obstinate culture of settling for higher and higher grades cumulatively from the system has impaired our thinking, we do not seek quality education and view grades as a natural extension of the quality of education.
While the exam board members are being suspended and teachers held in jail cells to sate the gathering mob, a whole opportunity to force a different debate on national education is going a begging.
That is the biggest shame of the current situation.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
