NOVEMBER 20 — I grew up deeply entrenched in the national school system in Malaysia, specifically Shah Alam. My kindergarten was Tadika Melody (now defunct) in Section 2, Shah Alam. My primary education was in SRK Section 6, Shah Alam (now known as Section 6 (1)), and my secondary school was in SMK Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah (SMKSSAAS), Section 2, Shah Alam.
Even when I continued my tertiary education, I went to UiTM Shah Alam.
With this in mind, I have experienced the good, the bad, the wacky of our national education system.
That being said, I did not turn out to be either a die-hard political nut on either side of the divide. And I am sure we have members in both sides of the political aisle who can say the same.
The primary and secondary education system is getting unfair treatment due to nothing less than the fact that we have seen mismanagement every other time. From leaked UPSR papers to the fact that some questions within exam papers being absolutely ridiculous. I am very certain that the Ministry of Education knows this and while action is being taken against those who transgress, not much is made public.
Perhaps one major reason for this is the need to stop the shaming of the transgressors, or even to ensure it does not lead to a public lynching.
We blame the education system too much. We blame it for kids becoming gangsters, teachers being rude, even blame it for the lack in sex education and pre-marital sex even.
But honestly, when did all these become the school and its staffers’ duties?
I urge people to go through the slow thinking process on this one. Children and teens spend a daily average of six hours in school a day. If you add in sleep, that would be another seven to eight hours, making it either 13 to 14 hours a day out of 24.
What do they do for another 10 to 11 hours?
Do we even know? Do we even care?
Myself, I was at one time going to cyber cafe’s playing Counterstrike or Starcraft while at other times just sitting home and raiding my dad’s library for novels written by Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum, Jeffrey Archer, non-fiction books by Matthias Chang, or even reading up Chin Peng’s biography.
At other times, I was opening certain websites that nowadays would make me recommend net filters, or spending hours on end watching Mega TV or Astro.
Taking the easy way out and blaming the school is a cop-out. For another 10 to 11 hours, we are content with simply blaming the school while kids and teens deal with heading out with friends, attending extra classes and even going to cybercafes to play DOTA or some other random mass multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG).
And I do empathise with the parents nowadays. It is not easy to make a buck and earn a living. But at the same time, teachers are not your children’s keepers, and neither is the help you keep around the house if you do.
There are things that remain your responsibility to teach, as well as to monitor.
It is not an easy task, and I do know the pressures of not being able to spend every hour of the day checking up on the kids in this day and age where taking care of them while needing to earn enough to pay the bills are a hassle.
But in this day and age of social media and smartphone technology, is it really that hard?
I have a 64-year-old mother who every now and then shows up on Facebook to tell me to mind my language either via SMS or an email. And every other Friday, she asks me whether or not I am coming back to Shah Alam for family brunch.
During my school days, both my parents would call home and even ask if I had washed the dishes after lunch or even whether I did my homework or my Kumon. And of course, she would also lambast me for calling her at work if I called to whine that my older brother was bullying me.
So did this all change for the current generation of parents? I wouldn’t know.
But I do know it was not just the school’s fault, or the universities or the teachers and lecturers.
Because it also goes to the kids and the parents. And in our continuous anti-government rants, we should not forget about who is responsible for the more than 10 to 11 hours spent away from school awake.
That is not the school’s jurisdiction. After all, there is a good chance that even those teachers and lecturers are themselves parents as well who have to deal with the same thing you face.
It is imperative that we consider that while you blame the lowering school standards and such, you are not just discrediting the students, but also those who were probably in the same schools as you were, who went through the same thing you did and are wondering what happened to the system.
So please, think about that before we lambast teachers, lecturers, schools and universities.
They do a lot of things wrong, but at the same time, we need to search our own souls to see our wrongs as well, either as a society, a parent, or a kid/teenage reaching maturity in a world with content right at out fingertips.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail Online.
