OCTOBER 1 — Kuala Pilah police arrested two 16-year-olds last week after a 14-year-old junior was found lifeless lying on his hostel bed. The Education Ministry orders an audit.
This is not the first, and unfortunately the column fears, not the last of deaths in government school hostels. How to forget Zara Qairina Mahathir’s tragic death in Sabah in July 2025?
It might be time to change one policy. That our government schools should be day schools only. Which means in stages closing government school hostels.
The government is far more competent in facilitating learning during the day than trying to do that and raise children into adults without parents.
Sticking to core competencies might be best for all, most certainly in the field of public education.
Education provider
The primary objective of government education is to provide the best possible instruction to all citizens who avail it. Use the funds to serve the most, best.
When the ministry provides housing, it takes on an additional and unnecessary burden which evidence grows, hurts the larger goal.
This differs with universities as the students are adults when they arrive. But in secondary and primary school hostels, they are adolescents. Age 15 and 20 can seem separated by a galaxy.
It’s foolish to assume that school hostels are merely beds and catering. The state replaces the parent effectively.
And parenting is all-consuming and ever-changing.
Parents commonly speak about the complicated challenges of raising children in the 21st century. Imagine the state being asked to care for many children with far reduced resources, definitely in the attention department.
Further, It distracts from the more achievable goals of classroom education and extracts unfairly a chunk of the joint education fund to run hostels. From the five million students in primary and secondary schools nationwide, there are approximately less than 200,000 students in hostels — or one in 25.
Even a poorly run hostel system is expensive. Even each convict costs over RM12,000 in our prisons annually.
The government should get out of the business of running hostels for those yet to be adults. It is ill-equipped to run them as evidence mounts.
Bullying times a gazillion
All schools experience bullying. It’s inevitable. However, when the students live in school, the harms are compounded.
The guy who torments a timid freshman at recess, dines across the hall and bunks with a motley crew in a dorm room next to the scared boy. The permutations are endless on how it ends poorly.
Which is the opposite to realities in a day school, where the culprit and victim go home.
There is physical separation even if limited respite in the Internet Age. At home, there are family members to draw support from or to confide in if it becomes unbearable.
In the hostel model, families are absent and the kids are grouped into little Lord of the Flies kingdoms.
Adolescence is a time of strong emotions and a lack of restraint. Very quickly the law of the jungle descends upon hostel occupants.
The prime minister himself as a hostel student will know first hand about all the things that can go wrong in these institutions.
The no-opt out situation
Defenders of the status quo will claim more good than bad emerge from the hostel experience.
Firstly, fatalities do not mean there are no other misdeeds inside the compound.
Mortality is the extreme and only reflects a larger dysfunction within the grounds.
The actual total number of victims is countless, and they thereafter live with the pain of hostel life throughout the remainder of their lives.
Second, the premier full-board schools, including MRSM seek continuity. That is completely natural but the government should disentangle.
These schools and their main sponsors, if they choose to persist, can become private institutions.
Then admission is the private decision by families and not tied to taxpayers. International schools have full-board but the students are self-selecting and the fees ensure resources are spent to provide comprehensive care and safety for the students.
The old boarding schools can graduate and level with international schools when they are fee paying.
Finally, necessity. There are hostel schools to cater for kids from small and rural communities. In both West and East Malaysia.
Two things. Malaysia is not the only country with this predicament and second, a child grows up more stable with a family rather than away on his own.
Wise to look at Australia, which is considerably larger with a litany of remote communities. There are options.
Eye in the sky
Consider, long-distance education, community instructors, mobile teachers and now the great boon of AI driven sessions.
All of these are in sync with the shifting education field and ask to balance learning with mental health.
Whether Iban, Orang Asli, Dusun or Bajau children, the inconvenience of learning from one’s own village is a pittance compared to the myriad of mistakes which can occur when a 10-year-old lives 60 kilometres away from mom and dad.
Today, a Starlink account can do the trick.
Our ministry with decades of experience may want to lift itself up to display agility and adeptness in overcoming physical limitations when it comes to education.
After all, the ministry prides itself in two years of Covid-19 where all Malaysians were learning from home most of the time and still sustained the national grade average.
It will also remember five of the seven students from Pos Tohoi in 2015 who died in the jungle from dehydration and hunger after fleeing their school hostel, trying to find a way home. They were between the ages of seven and 11.
Burn down the mission
Currently, Mara Corporation which governs the MRSM campuses thinks it has cracked the code by posting former military and police officers to act as wardens and cites the massive drop in bullying in the pilot programme. It’s quite naïve.
A hostel for adolescents is not purely about control, it is asked to nurture those inside.
Men who used to be in uniform may excel in some respects but may be quite wanting in others.
Do not forget the government releases continued information that the state of mental health among our young is less than desirable. The solution is likely closer to more parenting rather than absent parents.
There is a long queue of issues unanswered but there is enough here for those in the upper management rooms to discuss a different way of doing things.
A structural shift takes longer but has every chance to improve rather than one more audit or report.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
