Teachers suggest keeping syllabus and assessment simple to properly reform the national education system
Since the 1970s, countless “reforms” were made and executed by the executive branch, either by the portfolio minister or by the premier themselves, and yet we are currently stuck with the predicament of an education system that is churning out low-quality students and inept graduates.
And not to mention the disruptive effect of social media and applications — TikTok, Instagram etc — which single biggest achievement was to distract our students and graduates into believing that monetary pleasures and worldly glamour are their only purposes in life.
Pre-Covid, a study by the Department of Statistics Malaysia revealed that approximately 390,000 students, or a whopping majority of 72.1% secondary school leavers, were not interested to continue their studies at a higher level.
The main reason given then, in 2019, was that employment opportunities offered by the gig economy – which is temporary in nature and requires little or no education at all – were much more appealing than tertiary education. Imagine that, more than two-thirds of all students in the country.
Present time. The Education Ministry (MoE) recently opened up that 29,663 students out of 407,637 registered SPM candidates in 2022 did not sit for the exam. Making it worse was that out of those who sat for the exam, 70,445 candidates failed to get their certificates, due to, either absence or failing the core papers — Malay language and History. These factors alone have effectively taken out a quarter (24.5%) of these students out of the employment market.
An anecdotal incident painted a scary picture. A colleague recently related that five of her goddaughter’s friends with recently-announced-2022 SPM-results are giving their parents unanticipated headache. These kids — no run-of-the-mill but performing students with between five to seven As among them — have brazenly refused tertiary education as they claimed to be “burnt out” by the system.
Backed by the occasional TikTok and Instagram success stories, they believed that they would be more satisfied and make more money doing online trading or being social influencers. They are literally saying that professional engineers, lawyers or even medical doctors can go fly kite.
Back in 2019, we were forewarned of this phenomenon and it is now happening live.
When had education started losing its lustre? Has education, after all these years, deformed beyond salvage? Is social media, the Internet, to be blamed? What went wrong?
Speak to the proper stakeholders — you won’t get a response more truthful than that from the 405,716 teachers on the ground, guiding our 5.4 million students on a daily basis — and they would give you a straight answer.
When you consistently started cutting budgets, neglecting the basic tenets of the system and continuously making trivial changes to the curriculum, the rot will set in. And we’re seeing it now.
It is an open knowledge that during the decade of Datuk Seri Mohd Najib Razak’s administration, the developmental budget allocation for the MoE was continuously slashed year after year, giving it a negative compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of -7.73% between 2009 and 2018. So was the Higher Education Ministry, with similarly a negative CAGR of -1.22%.
Compare that to the allocation for the Prime Minister’s Department, which was bloated with a positive CAGR of 11.56% during the same period. It was last recorded at RM48 billion in 2018, constituting a quarter of all developmental expenditure. That was one hell of an enormous political kitty.
So what did the teachers suggest to properly reform the national education system?
Easy. Keep it simple.
Keep the syllabus simple, especially for primary schools. Don’t change for the sake of changing. Bring back civic education as a national subject to inculcate noble values — universally acknowledged as lacking for several generations since the subject was abolished.
Focus on the core subjects of Malay and English languages, Science and Mathematics. It is an open secret that the current syllabus is way, way too complicated for young students. Those who introduced it in the first place and those stacking on it over the subsequent years knew it too.
The consequence is evident now. Only 2.5% of students excelled, while the rest were acrimoniously left behind. Worse, a quarter has effectively dropped out.
Keep the assessment simple. Bring back the primary school assessment exam UPSR and Form Three assessment PT3. These exams gave students a sense of purpose; an objective in learning; a feat to achieve.
The class-based-assessment which work elsewhere, ie Australia, doesn’t work as the basis of reference is not similar. Those who abolished these exams don’t know that the current teachers in secondary schools have to contend with fifth-formers who could not even grasp the basic skills of reading, writing and counting.
These abominations exists because there is no common or universal standard of assessment available to refer to when the students cross over to the secondary school (UPSR) and to form four (PT3).
Keep the school streaming simple too. Don’t encourage exclusivity as we already have the boarding schools within the system, so introducing additional class of schools would unevenly suck out already scarce resources and give the administration an excuse of security. They would quote the successful stories to absolve blame and conveniently neglect the majority 97.5% students who have fallen behind.
Scrap the School Transformation Programme 2025 (TS25) as it will selectively benefit 600 public schools and deprive the other 9,640 schools throughout the country. There are already more than 289 private schools in the country, so leave the exclusiveness to this grouping.
In short, keep education simple and the deformity will correct itself.
- Asuki Abas is the editor at The Malaysian Reserve.
- This article first appeared in The Malaysian Reserve weekly print edition