Is it possible to run a poll on how students feel about the state of tertiary education or on the level of confidence employers have in local graduates?

I am a product of the Malaysian education system and I feel that a great disservice has been done on me by our government. Basically, students are molded into order-taking 'machines' in class. Teachers are superior and their ideas and theories are not to be questioned. On the rarest of occasion, there may be discussions in class.

Many a time, however, so-called discussions are only given 15 minutes, with the teacher as the only participant. Students are spoon-fed with truck-loads of information. Their brains saturated with raw information that was never processed in a proper manner. And passing the exams was easy: Just repeat the same phrase over and over. The secret to getting a higher mark? Repeat more phrases over and over.

The learning environment I was in certainly did not encourage any form of thinking. It encouraged memorising. I firmly believe that this strict regime that is still in place in our education system is killing many creative young minds.

While there have been calls for Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad to step aside after all the enormous good (arguable) that he has done for the country, I can't see him leaving his current post in the short term; he cannot afford to quit his job. Why? As noted journalist A Samad Ismail said when interviewed by malaysiakini ('Umno lacks capable, visionary leaders to replace PM: Pak Samad', Sept 18), there is no one as capable as the man to run the country.

What has this got to do with my earlier point? Well, if we don't restructure our education system to produce more thinking and capable leaders, we will probably have to wish for Dr Mahathir to live forever to guide us through to the next millennium.