Malaysian Student Leader's Summit

The MSLS was a two-day conference which brought together Malaysian students from campuses worldwide to listen to and discuss perspectives on education, the arts, politics, and socio-economic issues in Malaysia. Highlights included a heated debate on the PPSMI issue, light verbal sparring between Khairy Jamaluddin and Tian Chua, and a forum on Article 153 (which protects the status and special rights of Bumiputeras and more specifically, the Malay race).

So much was discussed that I eventually ended up with 23 pages of notes (relax. I used an A6 notebook). Over the next few days I'll post my thoughts on the "topik-topik hangat" which were discussed.

On PPSMI

"Bahasa Melayu mesti dimartabatkan." ~Dato' Saifudin bin Abdullah, deputy minister of higher education

"What are you going to do with a language whose value ends at KLIA or LCCT?" ~Wong Chun Wai, chief editor, The Star

My discussion group examined this issue. We decided that the government could have maintained the bilingual version of PPSMI while working on recruiting and training more English teachers. Teaching Maths and Science in English was not going to devalue the Malay language or produce students less proficient in Malay, as the Malay language syllabus is of a very high standard. We also decided that PPSMI failed to produce results because it was not planned and implemented in a wholistic manner, taking into account all the factors necessary for such a large-scale change.

The education system as a whole suffers from a huge problem in human resources and quality control measures. The system has failed to attract sufficient numbers, to adequately train and correctly deploy the teachers, whether in English or other subjects. Thus, change was far too sudden for teachers and students to be able to cope. On hindsight, the ministry might have commenced in stages, from educating the teachers to teach in English (starting from the training colleges, not through crash courses), raising the numbers of English teachers and the overall standard of English education, and then switching Maths and Science to English. Special care would need to be taken with allocating greater resources and more teachers to rural areas

Admittedly, though, this is easy to say only in hindsight. The original purpose of the switch lies in the murky regions between a desire to raise the standard of Maths and Science education and a desire to raise the standard of English education. Unfortunately teaching in English only helped widen the urban-rural divide as urbanites could choose to work in Malay or English, while rural students still depended on learning in Malay.

In my view (not my group's view), the question of which language to learn in is less important than the larger problems of teaching quality and student quality. The problems with human resources I have stated above. As for quality of students, the grade curves are toggled to the point that the passing mark can be as low as 20%, and the grades for As unbelievably low, producing A-students who sometimes can barely qualify for anything other than a public university. We need to recover the integrity of our education system and be brave enough to face the fact that it is failing to produce results in students, instead of tweaking the results to look good.

Finally, reverting the PPSMI is a wise choice if one has evaluated that the urban-rural divide has indeed widened, and if this effect is deemed to weigh more heavily against the arguments for keeping PPSMI. This seemed to be Dato' Saiful's justification of the decision. It is one which I actually accept, as urban students can afford the sacrifice more than rural students can afford another ten years of struggling in English while the government rushes to increase their standard of English--no easy task, when teachers are unwilling to be deployed to rural areas. It may be a step back, but if "they," whoever they are, can define a direction to take and stick to it after this, I wouldn't be so worried. The thing is, nobody knows who really studied the matter and who had a hand in the issue. The mess in human resource allocation is not just in the implementation but in the planning as well. Is the government relying on experts and academics in the field who can produce unbiased statistical data? Most likely not. If they are, then they aren't making the most of it by publishing the reports and communicating with more transparency. The habit of tweaking results is widespread. It's not just in our grades, it's in statistics and "investigations". So right now the decision to cancel PPSMI just looks politically motivated and nobody knows what "they" are going to decide next, and what "they" want to do with the education system in Malaysia. The lack of transparency and the shackles which bind educational policies to national politics worry me more than reverting to Bahasa Melayu.