Tackle education head on

THE recent furore over the intake of students into matriculation colleges is simply an indictment of the Pakatan Harapan administration’s lack of political will to take the educational bull by the horn and do what is right for the betterment of the country. The Cabinet’s disappointing decision to increase the number of students for matriculation programmes from 25,000 to 40,000 but maintaining the 90% racial quota for bumiputras will not raise the bar for local university admissions.

Increasing the number of matriculation students from 25,000 to 40,000 will likely result not only in a larger number of weak SPM students gaining access to matriculation programmes (securing 3As in the SPM results is deemed good enough for admission for many candidates) but will also make it even more difficult for STPM candidates to secure places for competitive courses in local universities.

And when racial quotas are so rigidly applied across the board for local university admissions, many bright science students with excellent results in the much tougher STPM exams would likely end up not being given the options they chose in their application for local university admission. These students might then head south (Singapore) and elsewhere, and in the process we would lose very good science brains.

We can ill afford to lose these talents, particularly now that our country has to deal with the challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and make a success of building our economy based on digital competency.

As such, it is hardly surprising that despite the clarion call to increase the number of students to take up STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, the number of bright SPM students choosing not to do Form Six is increasing steadily. Statistics show that the number of STPM science candidates has declined from 6,202 in 2016 to 5,475 in 2017, and dropped further by 16.6% to 4,566 in 2018. Chances are the number of STPM science candidates will continue to dwindle when the system is so biased in favour of matriculation programmes.

Furthermore, allocating an additional 15,000 places for matriculation students for the 2019 intake will likely have a negative impact on the quality of undergraduate students who later opt to go into the teaching profession. We already have in our system so many so-called graduate teachers who simply don’t have what it takes to impart the required knowledge and skills to their young charges. If we have English language teachers whose command of the language is shaky, and Science teachers who have not learned their subject matters well, we cannot expect them to do justice to their subjects.

Common sense dictates that the quality of an education system simply cannot exceed the quality of its teachers, no matter how many billions of ringgit we pour into grandiose educational development plans or blueprints. Datuk Mohd Zaid Ibrahim, our prominent local lawyer turned politician, has bluntly pointed out in his book I, Too, Am Malay that our policy makers are simply afraid to admit that a lot of our teachers are of questionable quality, and that our school curriculum is irrelevant and our administrators are being too political (Chapter 7, p 245).

And indeed, if we are facing a culture of mediocrity among our teachers, then our policy makers should not merely improve the quality of new teacher trainees but must also stop seeing our education system as a zero sum game, keep an open mind towards contrary views and be willing to accept solid and practical ideas that can help to improve the standards of our primary, secondary and tertiary education.

Really, why make life even more miserable for our over-stressed secondary students by making History (imbued with religious overtones) a compulsory subject to pass in the SPM exam? Also, in spite of repeated calls to scrap Moral Education, which hardly serves to develop our students into individuals with high moral standard, the Education Ministry still seems deaf to such pleas. Surely we can do better than that?

It is my humble opinion that due to various constraints within the system, the top-down approach of the Education Ministry will not work effectively. Instead, it needs to grant greater decentralisation of authority and autonomy to good schools in both urban and rural areas to adopt a broad curriculum, save for a few relevant core subjects, to let our students learn what they ought to learn to keep up with the times. Is that too much to ask for?

HENRY SOON Ipoh