Facilitate better communications between parents and teachers, dept told
KUCHING: The Education Department should encourage teachers to obtain the contact details of the parents of their students to facilitate better interactions between the parties.
In voicing out this suggestion, Minister of Education, Science and Technological Research (MESTR) Dato Sri Michael Manyin Jawong believes that this would enable the teachers to communicate with the parents more effectively whenever problems involving the students/ children arise.
“I would like to suggest that the Education Department in Sarawak issue a circular to all schools, stating that every teacher must know the handphone numbers of their students’ parents, so that the teachers and parents could communicate, even at night, concerning the children’s problems at school,” he said at the launch of the ‘Parents and Community Engagement Programme’ conducted by his ministry at SMK Datuk Patinggi Haji Abdul Gapor here yesterday.
Manyin said Finland, which he regarded as ‘the model for the whole world as far as education is concerned’, is already doing this.
He said during an official visit to Finland last May, the Sarawak delegates were informed that all teachers had the mobile numbers of their students’ parents – the teachers and the parents over there could communicate with one another at any time.
He also pointed out that as far as disciplinary problems were concerned, it was almost zero in Finland.
In this sense, he believed that to achieve the zero-discipline problem and high performance, the schools should fully involve the students’ parents.
“So if there’s any problem with the children, the parents must work with us. That is why we really appreciate your (parents’) presence here today (yesterday).
“I hope you would not stop here because the demand today is very different than that in the past,” he said.
Separately, Manyin reminded every teacher and parent in Sarawak to make sure that the children would ‘not just chase after on-paper qualifications’.
He said gone were the days when people would just present their curricula vitae (CV), their certificates, and their degrees to land jobs because nowadays, employers – be they from local companies or multi-national corporations – are ‘not really interested in paper qualifications anymore’.
According to him, the education sector and the job market are very competitive today whereby employers can virtually ‘engage anybody, employ anybody throughout the world’.
“So the competition is going to be very, very tough. As such, do not chase after paper qualifications, but chase after quality education.
“Teachers, as well as we in the ministry, must also emphasise the quality of education – not just on-paper qualifications.”
Manyin acknowledged that today, Malaysians are still paid based on their paper qualifications, but in many Western countries, the pay is largely based on contributions – he believed that the latter would be the practice in Sarawak in the future.
The minister also reminded all that paper qualifications would just be for entry level but later on, the qualification would be based on how much employees could actually make use of from their paper qualifications and contribute it to the companies that employ them.
He stressed upon parents that they should tell their children this because the demand for manpower has changed significantly from what it was in the past.