JANUARY 15 — It started over lunch. As it often does. A friend was deeply concerned about her daughter’s “impending” education.

Which school will she attend, will it be good enough? Mothers are generally worried about their children, more precisely their children’s future, but this mother in question’s only child was four months old. A little premature, no? Perhaps wait till she grows some teeth maybe, and I was not asking in my head the unthinkable — to delay the decision till she stops being breastfed?

I kept these thoughts to myself.

For you see, I’m single — without children as far as I can gather — and I feared any insouciant remark might lead to her hurting me with the wrong utensil, so I listened on.

Here’s the low and down, from suburbia’s circumspect souls. She and the husband are both young professionals and they are petrified of the quality of public schools.  To them, private schools are preferable but that would mean longer hours at their respective cubicles and kissing up to bosses with egos dwarfing their physical offices, and cringe about their lives until they smell senior management and power looms. And the work will get in the way of life’s less stressful distractions like Scrabble and maybe even in the way of having more Scrabble-playing children.

That’s what it takes to pay for private schooling in Malaysia, if the parents are middle-class.

So they are leaning to the practical solution, send the kid to a Chinese medium school. This on its own does not merit raised eyebrows except both parents are Malays. That’s not all, they are both Kelantanese Malays and probably have never seen the inside of a Chinese school.

They have come to terms that if there was a chance for their offspring in the public schools system then it has to be in a decent sized Chinese school close to their Subang home.

Nothing about that lunch conversation inspires for me confidence in our public schools.

2015 and education is looking like a major downer for the country.

It’ll be easier to be grotesque

With K-Pop molesters around, a convicted murderer with no money to return from Australia back to his prison cell in Sungai Buloh and a lawyer incarcerated for having an opinion about state driven religious indoctrination, it would be far more sensational to weigh in on those issues.

Public groping, murder whodunit and seditious liberals, sounds like enough controversy to fill column space.

But enough people are already chatting about those issues, and I want to get into my pet subject education, and ask why after a week of the new school year there is no leadership in the discussion over education?

All the sexy subjects lead to impasses and more importantly polarise. It appears that the powers that be are more drawn by these issues rather than one many Malaysians are willingly in agreement, our public schools are falling apart.

And to me, education is the silver bullet to annihilate the ignorance employed by mean werewolves to protect their kingdom.

There was never a time more critical than the present to fix our silver bullet.

They can’t spell collapsing

The public schools system is struggling. Which means the Chinese schools which are not semi or fully private, the Malay medium schools, the Tamil schools — all of them — and the religious schools are struggling. The teachers are weaker, the facilities are poorer, the results are worrying and the measures have been always half-hearted and built on political civility.

What is the system instead preoccupied with?

Power for its political master. That is why the easy way is taken to appease whoever needs to be appeased.

For they fear trouble with teachers — they vote, they teach tuition, they are mostly women, they cook for their husbands and they run polling stations on general election day — messing with them can be dire for the government of the day.

There is a colossal need to satisfy parents — they rarely know learning, they know grades; they have friends in the office to compete with; they like tuition to be additional daycare; and they outnumber the teachers as voters 20 to 1 — that never ends. Happy parents want things to remain the same, which means the same government in power.

Students are always x-factors in any country, therefore they need to be averted from paths leading to open rebellion, say not end up like Indonesian students who sat on tanks at the end of the Suharto administration.

Indoctrination, it can never be too early, the drive to remove from students their will to have independent thought, natural curiosity which leads to indeterminate outcomes is relentless — and instead instil in them a central fixation with race distinctions and obeisance to those in power.

When those are the priorities, then reading, writing and counting become “what we can have, if it is not too expensive or time consuming.” Appreciating comparative information, rational writing and reasoning become enemies of the state.

It starts with honesty

The Razak Report in 1956 already stated that there should be a single public schools system and Malay should be the medium of instruction.

Maybe the eroding structure presently coupled with shrinking budget for public schools may lead to non-sectarian discussion about unifying the school system to give the best to the most.

A real discussion, not one of self-interest only. The path to a single system is arduous and not to be achieved overnight, but any chance for it begins with a fair public debate.

Because the self-interest is nauseating.

The Chinese schools are the best public school options in the larger parts, and that has a lot to do with their administrators. But on the same token, they have used every sinew of political influence to avoid a single schools system. And neither can they absorb all the students from the failing sister medium.

The percentage of state funded-religious school alumnus in senior corporate positions should sound the alarm on how a little bit more counting and reading in English may give them a chance to have a future other than pursuing religion as a career.

There are contradictions everywhere in the debate on education in Malaysia, and no leader has been honest about where we are, what is possible and laying a roadmap built on a commitment to education. Unless that is done, Malaysians will continue to fall in all types of assessments for secondary school students.

A single public school system is only about saving cost, exploiting scale and maximising educational opportunities. All the arguments against it still remain. I’ve not rebutted them and Malaysia has a peculiar socio-economic structure and dynamics, therefore any change to the system will be sticky.

As far as it stands for my friend with the toddler, there are still five years before her first child attends primary education. That’s not long, but maybe saner minds will prevail and policy shifts occur. At least a general election will pass. 

*This is the personal opinion of the columnist.