Education System in Malaysia

Let me play devil advocate here. Please do not flame this post.

Learning Instituition

A school is an institution where pupils/students learn from teachers. In most systems of formal education, students progress through a series of schools: kindergarten, primary school, secondary school, college, university. Education in Malaysia may be obtained from government-sponsored schools, private schools, or through home schooling.

The government introduced racial quota in Malaysia education system. The government gives more chance for the Malays to get into public universities (IPTA), narrowing the chance of other races to get into it. Years ago, there was a case where more than 100 of non-Malay top students who achieved well in STPM were rejected from certain public universities. If I was not mistaken, the students obtained excellent results which are 5A’s and he/she couldn’t get his/her education choice (which is medicine). Instead, they got offered a course that is not listed in their original 8 courses applied. How can this happen? STPM is known for its credibility, and toughness in examination. Anyone taking STPM really have big balls!!! I’m not joking, I really mean it. . It is considered 1 of the hardest papers in the world. Seeing these excellent student rejected from certain public universities is really disappointing.

Further researches showed that the universities were accepting more Malays than other races, although there are students who have better results and qualifications that were rejected by those IPTA, making it unfair to all other non-Malay students. This is the main reason many of Malaysia’s top students are now working in Singapore (a city with only 3 million populations, but double the economy size of Malaysia).


Attitudes during Schooling Period

First of all, it's always about that "My child is better than yours" attitude among Malaysian parents. In general, of course this is a healthy culture which promotes the spirit of wanting to be the best. This soon forces the parents to pressure their child to be the best among the class. Grades were everything, and what these people study for the next 10-12 years of their early lives is just to score for the exams, make sure they are better than their friends(in terms of 'my marks is higher than yours' of course). This is where everything went wrong, parents, students, teachers all assessing the performance of a student through a simple paper based examination.

Well for one thing, our education system produce way too many robot and photocopy machines thanks to the exam system and spoon feeding nature. Everything was about memorizing; there was hardly any focus on critical thinking or researching. Everything was almost always laid right in front of them for them to absorb without having them to understand it first. Take those away and you'll see students going “ding dong”. I've seen students in college and university level who don't even know how to use the library (minority though)! Shocking! And when these students fails to understand what was thought at a higher level, they attempt to plagiarize instead of trying to understand it.

Giving up an example, "Nur Amalina Che Bakri digelar guru kelasnya sebagai ‘Budak Buku Teks’ kerana keupayaannya mengingati semua pelajaran yang diajar". Quoted from Kejayaan Terbilang. They praise Amalina because she could memorize well instead of can understanding well. Memorize well - is this a quality that we need to achieve Wawasan 2020? Now what we need is innovative, creative and thinking out of box. The reason failure of Malaysia is because we produce a lot machine who can memorize well. It is a total failure as we can’t even practice it in our daily life. What Malaysia need is creativity, something new, not something from textbook.


UPSR, PMR and STPM

The REAL reason why our education system will NEVER improve is majority of Malaysians do not care about education. They would rather spend the money sending astronaut to space, building 400 millions Istana, Petronas Twin Tower and other more glamorous projects. The famous Malay saying

"Gaya mesti mahu"

We must show off.

Then, we have NEP. Everything start going down hill from there. If the majority of Malaysian citizen cared about the education system, they could have done something. They could have asked we have money to build Petronas Twin Tower but why we have NO money to build better school. They could have asked for meritocracy in our education system. They should have done something when our university is NO longer in any world ranking.

We used to have good teacher and we have a good system. Our university had world ranking. This was 20 to 30 years ago.

What we have over here is abused and misused of resources. Spend a lot more money in building a beautiful and large library building but with minimal books in the library. Plus, keep the opening hours short so that nobody can have access to the library. And, so on.

So, to the majority of Malaysians, we do not have a problem with education. Government will provide jobs for majority of Malaysians anyhow regardless of whether they know anything or not. So, why worry??

Don't worry, be happy.

Have you ever meet rural Malays? They are the MAJORITY. They care more about religion than education. Education is NOT important for them. That is why you see beautiful mosque at the rural area but the school is horrible. We are the MINORITY that cares about education. In democracy, MAJORITY rule.

And, that is the saddest part of the story. We have so much resource but we have neither the will nor intention to really educate anyone. It is all wasted away.

They voted and keep current government in power. They had shown to the government that education is NOT important. Now, their children will have suffer form their decision. They got what they deserved.