FEBRUARY 24 — Who, in these increasingly tough times, can afford to stay in multimillion dollar condos or bungalows in the tony areas of KL, be chauffeur driven in a late model continental car, and send their kids to an international school with a maid in tow without any financial pain? UN officials, expats in MNCs and a small set of the Malaysian elite come to mind.
But bother to look closely outside these same private and international schools at drop-off times and another category becomes apparent. Malaysian mothers driving their kid(s) themselves in their Honda Odysseys and their equivalent from Subang and PJ.
The quality of a national school system can be judged by the number of parents competing for their kids to either be a part of it, or not part of it.
All parents are genetically hardwired to want and try and provide the best for their offspring in order to increase their chances of survival. In these times, that equates to quality education that gives the child a competitive advantage in the race of life.
While the rich do not even have to consider the national school system, the poor really don’t have any other choice.
Those caught in the middle are a set of Malaysian parents who while not exactly poor are making some serious sacrifices to send their kids to private and international schools.
If the mushrooming of these schools is any indication, the trend is growing and here to stay.
The only thing that separates these parents from their counterparts across the country is access and means. The reality is that as education is increasingly politicised, standards decline and teacher morale drops.
With that, parents begin to lose confidence in the system and look for alternatives. Those with access to alternatives and the means to afford them take the leap.
Those who are left behind, both teachers and students, suffer further drops in morale and thus competitiveness.
While the syllabus, pedagogical techniques, free and universal access and quality of hardware are all important ingredients in the educational mix, some other factors seem even more fundamental in today’s times for judging the desirability of a school.
The enthusiasm and dedication of the teaching staff, commitment to the mastery of English and Mandarin to a lesser extent as a language and the past performance of the school in terms of student outcomes seem to be critical in the eyes of parents with an eye towards the future.
In this regard, it is clear which way the wind is blowing. There is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that for even those parents without the means to afford private education, Chinese stream schools and those that have committed staff and therefore stellar academic outcomes are the ones in demand.
Parents, much like kids, are not all racists, they merely seek out the best opportunities.
The incessant tinkering with curricula to reflect changing notions of racial, linguistic and religious identity combined with the insistence on blind loyalty to the government of the day by academic staff would sap the morale of even the most optimistic educator, let alone those in the national system making do with small salaries and a tremendous workload.
The biggest loser in such a system is the idea of equal opportunity. The children of privilege will inherit and live a life of privilege, those without will live without and those in the middle will only break into the circle of the haves on the back of enormous sacrifices of their parents.
A start towards change of the right kind is not that difficult, however. Training and hiring teachers who genuinely want to teach and who have the skills for this century would be a good place.
Not only would paying them wages commensurate with the work they do help, it would also stem the haemorrhaging of competent teachers from rural to urban and from the national to the private system.
Making them accountable, not just to bureaucrats but to parents too, would be a step forward. Understanding that helping kids master English and Mandarin is not treason but a practical acknowledgement of the tools required in an increasingly globalised future would help too.
Finally, emphasising skill development over moral and religious studies in schools will not lessen the faith of the pupils, but merely separate the functions of school and home as places to primarily imbibe secular life skills through formal education and spirituality and moral values through parental exposure.
The next generation surely deserves as much.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
