The government is considering to hire at least one full time counselor for every primary and secondary school in a move to tackle growing indiscipline among students, Education Ministry Parliamentary Secretary Mahadzir Mohd Khir said today.

The ministry also plans to register these counselors with the professional body of counselors in order to ensure they are trained and qualified.

Mahadzir said the new plan would not financially burden the ministry as it only needed to convert the current teacher-cum-counselor to a full time counselor.

"Teaching and counseling need to be separated, what we are trying to do is to minimise the current dual-purpose teacher workload first to let them concentrate on counseling and proceed with the full time counselor plan," he told reporters at the Parliament lobby.

He said a full time counselor could also play an important role in helping primary school children to be aware of issues such as child abuse etc.

Caning guidelines

The parliamentary secretary said counseling should precede other forms of disciplinary action such as caning .

The ministry had earlier decided to confer teachers with the power to cane following the rising cases of gangsterism in schools although the move has raised concerns among several quarters.

A national panel was also set up to gather public feedback on the decision and tasked to come up with guidelines on canning errant students.

Commenting on the guidelines, Mahadzir said they were introduced in the past but the ministry recently distributed copies of them again to schools as a "reminder" after concerns were raised by several quarters.

Earlier in the Dewan Rakyat , Mahadzir was grilled by several DAP parliamentarians after his reply on the lesser number of Chinese and Tamil schools to be built in the country.

In the question-and-answer session, Tan Kok Wai (DAP-Cheras) requested Mahadzir to state the number of vision schools, national schools, Chinese and Tamils schools to be built under the Eighth Malaysian Plan.

Sarcastic reply

Mahadzir then read out detailed figures of each category and stressed that the ministry has planned to build more national type schools under the plan.

But Tan rebutted him in the supplementary question, saying the number of national type schools was instead reduced compared to the 70s.

Mahadzir then urged the DAP MP not to worry since the national type school and mother tongue education are protected under the Education Act 1996.

"DAP, please don't try to be the champion of Chinese schools, MCA is the real champion," he replied sarcastically. This led to a protest from DAP MPs.

While the shouting match continued in the House, Deputy Speaker Muhammad Abdullah disallowed a second supplementary question since "this issue has been raised many times before".