The Ministry of Education’s review of the UEC certification for entry to local universities has again led some politicians to lobby for maintaining the old system.

While these rich and powerful people send their own children abroad, they have left our education system to deteriorate so badly. Our public universities are struggling with international rankings, our secondary school children’s Pisa scores falter. Tertiary institutions produce thousands of unemployable graduates who can’t speak English and are totally unsuited for the 21st-century workplace.

When politicians speak of promoting race and language, the objective of education changes and no longer prioritizes producing capable, competent, employable graduates who can develop the country.

Instead, decisions are made based on less-objective criteria since nationalism and loyalty can never be clearly measured. Often, those who loudly shout and show their love for race and language are the ones who are best at hiding their technical inabilities.

In reality, this leads to the promotion of those who are incompetent but politically obedient, into positions of authority. This has happened in Maoist China and has been occurring for the last 50 years in Malaysia.

Education then becomes a tool of political patronage, with bureaucrats seeking promotion, cronies seeking contracts, and politicians seeking kickbacks. While they prosper, our rural school facilities deteriorate, computers break down and ceilings collapse.

From multiracial and multi-strata interaction in our national schools, we now see increasing segregation into religious, Chinese/Tamil or international schools.

Previously, we produced English-speaking graduates who were able to find their footing in every corner of the world. Now, we generate unemployable university graduates who are unable to write a coherent letter or even perform adequately in job interviews.

From producing giants like Mahathir Mohamad, Abdullah Badawi and Anwar Ibrahim, we now produce attention-grabbing politicians who break the law, smashing beer bottles and perversely parading themselves publicly in towels.

From producing independent pathfinders, our students are now taught to be subservient and docile, spending all their time studying to pass term examinations. Over the last 50 years, this has been the result of our education policy. Those who are truly patriotic to the country must be brave enough to change its course.

We should thus not just recognise the UEC certificate for entry to local universities, but also recognise any legitimate high-quality pre-university certification. Thus, whether it be with A-Levels or the International Baccalaureate or matriculation programmes, students capable and competent should be encouraged to seek entry to our universities. Only with high-quality students can our institutions of higher education advance.

Meanwhile, to ensure competency in the national language, an entry examination can be held, with only those performing well in the Bahasa examination allowed to take up their offered positions.

Again, recognising different pre-university programmes does not mean an abandonment of the affirmative admission policy. Whether it be by racial breakdown or income levels, computer programmes can be easily devised to take in the appropriate number of the type of students the decision makers decide upon.

Those confusing entry criteria with affirmative action policies and national language promotion are only seeking to hide their laziness and ignorance of technical issues. Helping the disadvantaged and fostering nationhood through Bahasa should not become excuses the incompetent mediocre hide behind since it results in a race to the bottom.

An education system is supposed to develop every child to his or her fullest potential. We must stop pushing our best and brightest to seek university studies abroad, inducing them to emigrate, leaving behind lonely parents of all races and social classes. It is illogical for us to work hard, only to contribute our hard-earned income to the coffers of universities in other countries.

We should model the systems in Japan and Korea, and let a new holistic education policy create giants of our local universities, attracting the best products every system has to offer. Overseas education, on scholarship or otherwise, should be for post-graduate education so that the better-developed young minds after local university exposure can absorb the good and keep out the bad of unfamiliar foreign influences.

In seeking to develop our universities, student catchment must be widened to include the best products of the many secondary school systems that now exist in the country. Accepting various types of entry certification should not be seen as a failure to promote Bahasa as the national language, nor should it be confused with the abandonment of affirmative action to aid under-privileged racial groups.

It is time to stop self-serving politicians and incompetent bureaucrats from manipulating matters. Only those uneducated in statistics, computers and data analysis would confuse the issues. It is time for the Education Ministry and minister Maszlee Malik to think holistically and accept not just the UEC but all high-quality pre-university certificates awarded by the various education systems in Malaysia.

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.