Baffled by plan to abolish elite classes

I REFER to the report “School elite classes to be done away with in three years” ( The Star, Dec 14).

Since the colonial era, the streaming of classes has been the responsibility of school principals or headmasters/headmistresses and many have opted for setting up elite classes.

I attended the Methodist Boys School, Kuala Lumpur from 1953 until 1963, became a teacher, senior assistant, principal in eight secondary schools from 1964 till retirement in 2000 and then resumed service as a principal in a private institute where I remain until now.

All the schools I have been with practised the elite class system except the private institute, which has smaller classes of less than 20 students of mixed abilities in each class.

In other words, the streaming of students according to merit in the respective classes has been the practice in all the government schools I have known.

Being a principal for 20 years in eight government secondary schools, I had the privilege of attending the state and national annual conferences and sharing experiences with my fellow heads of school.

I never heard of any school that did not adopt the streaming system, and if it was ever done, it must be an isolated case.

Thus, it is baffling to hear that the Education Ministry reportedly aims to do away with the system of elite classes in the country’s schools by 2020.

I am also wondering how this can be done. How is the teacher going to teach a class of about 40 students of mixed abilities?

If the approach of the teacher is to teach the whole class together, going at the pace of the learning capability of the average students and making sure they understand the lesson, at the end of the day the good students would surely lose out.

Of course, we can talk of peer group teaching, that is good students teaching the weaker ones. Alternatively, the teacher can use cooperative or self-assessment learning methods with the help of educational technology.

But the truth of the matter is, whatever pedagogy is used, the teacher must absolutely have good control of the different groups of students when teaching, instructing, assessing, evaluating and supervising them.

And the students, especially the weaker ones, must be highly motivated to learn otherwise they might become restless and disrupt the class, leading to disciplinary problems.

To run a class of mixed abilities successfully, the teacher either needs to be provided with an assistant teacher or the class must be reduced to 20 students to avoid depriving anyone of individual attention.

Ideally, the textbooks, worksheets and assignments should be of different levels to cater to the different levels of students’ abilities in order to make an effective impact on the teaching and learning environment.

I would humbly suggest that the Education Ministry do a pilot study of mixed ability class and the teacher’s and students’ performance before considering abolishing the elite class system.