QUESTION TIME | There is much anecdotal evidence that Malaysia’s standard of education has dipped over the years especially following the implementation of the New Economic Policy (NEP) and the rapid introduction of Malay into the education system from the 1970s onwards.

Although such a decline is difficult to document, there is some evidence for this from the scores of Pisa, or Program for International Student Assessment, the only such assessment available for those countries which participate in this survey by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or OECD.

This was clearly indicated in the 2012 scores for Pisa which showed that even as Singapore topped the scores, the results for Malaysia were appalling, coming out 52 overall out of 65 countries and lagging behind countries such as Thailand, Kazakhstan and Iran.

For the 2015 Pisa scores, Malaysia claimed that it had made major progress but it turned out that it had not even been included in the results for various reasons as pointed out by DAP leader Lim Kit Siang in his blog.

MP Ong Kian Meng said, quoting the Pisa report, this was due to the following: "In Malaysia, the Pisa assessment was conducted in accordance with the operational standards and guidelines of the OECD. However, the weighted response rate among the initial sample Malaysian schools (51 percent) falls well short of the standard Pisa response rate of 85 percent. Therefore, the results may not be comparable to those of other countries or to results for Malaysia from previous years."

Not only was Malaysia’s standards in terms of reading, science and maths appalling, the Education Ministry was trying to cover it up!

A number of factors were responsible for the slow and steady decline of the Malaysian educational system. Let’s go back in history and try and identify the main reasons why this happened.

1. From English to Malay. The first was the hasty reversal of English as the medium of instruction in national schools. The NEP and the rise in Malay nationalism dictated the national language policy of the time that Malay be progressively introduced into the national education system.

Ironically, in the 70s when he was education minister, this was spearheaded by none other than Dr Mahathir Mohamad, the former prime minister of 22 years who is now opposition leader.

Mahathir reintroduced English for the teaching of science and maths in 2003, the last year he was prime minister, but this policy was reversed by none other than his political bedfellow now and then education minister and deputy prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin in July 2009, barely three months after Najib Razak became prime minister.

English was apparently good for Umno ministers and their children but not good enough for the mass of Malays who went to national schools and whose subsequent chance of employment in the private sector and advancing their knowledge was impeded by their poor English.

Until today, many of the top Malays were those who received an English education either here or overseas or both. Numerous Malays have said publicly that good knowledge of English enabled them to rise up the career ladder and many Malay parents want their children to be educated in English...