COMMENT | The ambitious political goal of building a competitive national economy, in Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) reality, where knowledge becomes the key factor of industrial progress, requires highly accentuated attention to the education sector as a true engine room of future national prosperity and the pipeline of economic miracles.

While Malaysia’s Education Blueprint 2013-2025, in its opening pages, proudly boosts its higher spending on education among its regional peers, those same peers, together with other top-education nations, significantly overtake it in terms of national educational outcomes and economic and well-being impact (Figure 1).

Meanwhile, Malaysia remains in the lower tiers of international performance test results such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS)...