This article by Azly Rahman  has come to my attention today, citing one of the major problems, our education system. Our younger minds today are getting a sub par education, an education that breeds “mediocrity and an unthinking citizenry. Our curriculum is not challenging enough to meet the needs of globalisation and to create the next generation of children who will become global thinkers”.

 

What surprises me even more than my peers ,who are also indoctrinated by the same education system, is that I did agree to the same notion that our education sucks, too, and it needs improvement. It doesn’t occur to my peers that slapping the education system that created them is an indirect slap to oneself.

I am proud of the education that I gone through, even though I slept through it, and on the rare occasion I stayed awake, it was usually due to something else (that girl on the second row is really cute). And here is my opinion.

Here are some of the counter-points on the issue

*Sarcasm begins*

1) Our education breeds unthinking citizenry

I personally feel very insulted by this very entry. We as teenager are great thinkers! Back in my days, our essay topics were not ‘My birthday, or my pet dog’, but were ‘How to curb smoking among teenagers’ and ‘How to mitigate the effect of inflation’, questions that only individuals like economists or sociologists have the authority of doing. And is it something that our government should be doing (?) .

Yet as students we are already tasked to answer such important questions - we talked about globalisation in our opening essays and how smoking is still a problem despite that (which when you think about it, has no relation at all), we talked about how we can curb those problems with the ‘Five Easy Solutions’.

A) Individual (I do not smoke to curb smoking).

B) Friends (we influence our teen friend not to smoke).

C) Family (daddy doesn’t smoke in front of teen).

D) Teachers and schools (schools and teacher put up posters not to smoke).

E) Government (government have  “Don’t smoke” campaigns).

We have been tasked as the economist, sociologist, psychologists, engineers throughout all these essay questions, and the five solutions have been our pillars to all these grave issues in our school essays. We have been thinking like that even until now, waiting to express our opinions when issues like these emerge.

We, as productive Malaysians have been very vocal in Malaysiakini and Facebook when Malaysia faced big problematic issues. What boggles our mind is how the person in charge of this grave issue just can’t see how easy it is (It’s the government!). They should have stepped down and let us be the person in charge.

2) Our education breeds mediocrity

I do not see the author’s point of view of why “breeding mediocrity” is a problem in education. Mediocrity, by definition, is the state of being average, and average is the very state that we as a society are! A few are successful, some others fail miserably, and most are hanging there, being in the middle. If this is how the society works, and if it is how standard distribution works, why would education be the exception?

The authors that blame education in a downfall fail to see the beauty of “mediocrity”. Malaysia is a multi-racial, ethnic-rich country. While it is a great selling point to our annual tourism campaign, it is however a disaster when it comes to management. Managing different people with different background is a very tiring effort, which is why I applaud the government’s effort to create a 1 nation 1 system kind of education.

It’s economically more viable to train students to think like-minded rather than having teachers to be sensitive and aware of differences between students! Categorisation and classification have been the holy grail in office file management, and why again should education be the exception?

When we allow different opinions, we will have people like Ambiga Sreenevasan, Ibrahim Ali, Anwar Ibrahim and Lim Kit Siang who create havoc either by clogging up the newspaper (instead of singing our government’s praises) and demonstrations that clog KL roads even worse! As a KLite living in Malaysia, I will forgo a better democratic government if it means I will be late on my way to work.

3) Education is the cause of all social problems we have

We have also created Mat Rempits, Ah Longs and gangster in the estates. We have neglected the development of their minds and created successful failures through the schools we build.

Do we honestly have to blame education for everything, as we did for Form Five essays back in secondary school?  Logically speaking, the reasons why we have Mat Rempits now instead of 15 years ago are because motorcycles are more affordable to the general public, and ‘Rempit-ing’ is much easier thanks to the better engineering design of our motorcycle.

Ah Longs and gangsters do not exist because our education make them. The author simply fails to see that those professions are more profitable in current socio-economics government (after all, they are in the same field).

If a good education means we should discriminate against Mat Rempits, Ah Longs and gangsters as a failure of society, as opposed of individuals who simply acted differently from the social norm, then I am utterly not impressed. And then the author talks about breeding mediocrity as a bad thing...

*Sarcasm ends here*

We often complain about the standardisation of our Malaysian education, about how assigning grades is bad, and how is getting more A is something to be worried about instead of something that should be celebrated.

We never see the flip side of things - like how do we quantify the performance of our education unless it is done through grades - how would employers hire if they cannot tell how is one better than the other. And most of all, the western education systems that we heralded so much suffers from the exact same things as we Malaysians did.  In fact, I will go as far as to say that our education problem is the norm, not the exception.

Education should not be heralded as the holy grail of solution for every problem, and complaining that education as the root of all problems while ignoring the fast changing state that we are in, the social-politic economic situation that is fast changing in Malaysia - is evidence of how ‘good’ education been doing to their minds.

It’s as important to question what we learn as much as learning as much as we can.