Our mentality is the real problem

TALK about educational reform is rife with the Education Minister announcing a revamp of the education system by 2020. On the other hand, the rise in the number of Malaysian parents sending their children to international schools especially in urban areas is a sign that more and more people are losing faith in the national education system.

The question is: What really is wrong with education in Malaysia?

The answer is that the real problem lies not in the education system but in the mentality of Malaysians themselves towards education. Before addressing the system and talking about educational reform, we must address the way we think about education.

To Malaysians, a good education is getting 5As in UPSR, 8As in PMR, 10As in SPM, 5As in A-Levels and a first class degree from a top university. It seems that education has become a race for grades rather than a race for knowledge.

The first thing students who sat for public exams get asked is how many As they scored. These exams are often a nationwide spectacle gaining much media coverage, and acing them seems to be the primary goal of students and teachers alike. Parents very often try as hard as they can to get the best tuition providers – those who can guarantee As for their children.

Due to peer pressure and pressure from their parents, children become so engrossed in this pursuit for As that they just end up memorising the textbooks and regurgitating the answers during the exams rather than learning the actual subject. This also puts undue and unnecessary pressure on them. It is extremely sad to see cases of suicide among students sitting for public exams just because they can’t handle the pressure.

The current way of thinking also does not encourage children to think out of the box, ask questions and develop a passion for the subject. This will have serious repercussions once they pursue their university education, which is entirely independent learning.

While children may have the “luxuries” of going for tuition and being spoon-fed in school, there is no such thing in university where, if you don’t understand a particular topic, it is entirely up to you to find ways of understanding it and passing the subject.

My days as an undergraduate and postgraduate student in Britain changed my perspective on education. Having graduated from the school and education system here, I must say that I initially had a tough time acclimatising myself during university.

During my early undergraduate years, I used to sometimes blindly memorise facts and try to regurgitate them during the exams without truly understanding what I was studying. It was only during the later years of my course that I began to understand the proper way of studying and learning by understanding the subject.

There were also times during lectures when I used to wonder why the local (British) students asked questions that seemed to me to be “bizarre” and unrelated to the subject. I realised later that these questions were actually related to what we were learning. The fact was that the local students were more well read on the subject and they were able to think beyond the textbooks.

The only way for us to change this rather rigid way of thinking about education is to understand its true meaning. Education is the process of learning and understanding a new set of skills or knowledge and being able to apply that knowledge and skills in the next stage of one’s development.

Students should be encouraged to understand what they are learning and be able to apply the knowledge that they learn rather than just memorising and vomiting out facts. As a simple example, a medical student who tops his class and aces all his exams may not necessarily be a good doctor if he is not able to apply that knowledge to accurately diagnose and treat his patients in the real world. The same applies to a lawyer, engineer or any other professional.

Let us try to change the way we think about education. Enough with this obsession for As. I am not saying that grades are not important but an overemphasis on them should not overshadow the actual learning process.

The younger generation should be encouraged to think, enjoy the education process and be passionate about learning. Only then will they turn out to be competent and knowledgeable individuals.

I would like to share the words of Professor Sir Steven Cowley, who is currently director of the United States Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. This is what he said to us on the first day of a class on Electromagnetism: “To be honest with all of you, I don’t really care what grades you get in the exam at the end of the year. My job is to make sure you guys understand the principles of electromagnetism because this is what you will be using at some point in your scientific careers. There is no point in getting good grades when you are not able to use what you have learnt in university in your everyday lives”.

To conclude, before changing the system, we need to change ourselves.

RUEBEN A. S. DASS Petaling Jaya