The Government and its "Premature" Education Policies

Besides being critical of the Najib administration, former prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad is seen not to have lost his sense of humour when he recently mentioned that he would want to be the prime minister again if he has a chance.

One of things he would want to do is to bring back the teaching and learning of Science and Mathematics in English (PPSMI).

PPSMI is something he brought to the nation while in his last year as the PM.

Having also introduced the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) and the new administrative capital, Putrajaya, he is sometimes referred to as Malaysia's Father of Modernisation.

In summary, his period of administration was mostly about modernising Malaysia with mega infrastructures, mega projects, investments and bringing forward education to the "next level", hence PPSMI.

It was intended that PPSMI will globalise the students early in schools by having them learn Science and Mathematics in English so as to complement the need to empower the fields in the current lingua franca.

But things didn't really turn out as well as it should have.

It was already a problem in rural areas where opportunities to get extra materials and classes to reinforce learning is less than in urban areas. This is an important factor of the education gap happening now.

To worsen the situation, the language education, particularly English, in rural areas is also a major disadvantage to the students there. It is an open secret that in schools with around 90% Malays – even secondary schools – the English-language teachers speak Malay more than English during lessons.

Is this supposed to help them have more chances to communicate the language, let alone enhance their skills?

As far as we're concerned, this may only help the kids to pass standardised exams rather than learn the language.

At the end of the day, they essentially don't learn anything, have problems in understanding the basics of Maths and Sciences, in English.

If this is just to widen the gap of enhancing the students' skills in Maths and Sciences, what good has been brought about here?

In my opinion, this was a problematic and rather "premature" education policy brought forth by Dr Mahathir.

A few years after Dr Mahathir retired, the PPSMI policy was reversed and the teaching of  Science and Maths was back to being taught in Bahasa Malaysia. A problem may have been solved. But yet, another one arises.

In 2014, the Education Ministry introduced a more thorough implementation of School-based Assessments (PBS), which was formerly implemented to mostly oral tests for language subjects.

It is actually good that we have finally found a way out of an extremely exam-oriented system and taking a step forward. But yet, the "pre-conditions" were not yet satisfied beforehand.

Generally, a classroom with a teacher usually holds some 40 students. This would mean that the teachers would be burdened with the workload of updating the current students' achievements in the system, thus adding another burden beside the job of teaching.

Different from being a university lecturer, a school teacher, when he or she teaches, must get to know their students one-by-one and constantly have a personal touch in order to do so.

Now that the workload is burdening them more, they have less chance to actually teach and nurture the kids.

In addition to that, it was reported that there are some 29.7% of schools in Malaysia categorised as schools with small number of students, with 90% of these schools also very poorly-funded; some of them even reside in other schools' facilities and buildings.

These schools, due to having a small number of students, practise multi-grade teaching.

As far as we can see from the environment of these schools, this is not a plausible condition to implement that kind of system.

And if that is not bad enough, the PBS management system (SPPBS) would just complement the compilation of the "worsts" of PBS. The system keeps hanging and lagging, it would make a perfect match with the tons of workloads the teachers have to face.

Add to that the slow internet speed that just makes this task of updating the system all the more difficult.

According to Asean's report on internet speed index of the member nations, Malaysia's average internet speed is only around 5.5 Mbps, far from the global average of 17.7 Mbps, let alone our neighbour Singapore's 61 Mbps. Even Vietnam beats us!

With the implementation of PBS, both teachers and students are expected to make use of ICT. But from the research carried out at a rural school by a team from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), almost 80% of the students in that secondary school don't have a computer at their home, with more than 50% of them not being competent enough to utilise them. In fact, 70% of them only get to use the computer for just around an hour a day.

Besides that, a good 42.9% don't know how to use Microsoft Word and 60% of them reportedly don't really know how to use email.

PBS ends up being just another "premature" policy brought forth by the Education Ministry.

So if Dr Mahathir or anyone from the current Umno really want to be the PM, could they please consider making education policies that would better meet the current conditions?

Because if not, what is the real use of education policies if they only benefit certain groups of people?

*First appeared on The Malaysian Insider on 16th of February, 2015 ()